lance of time dwell on it in detail. The case was lost-lost through my culpable remissness-for I was altogether unable to follow out the course I had sketched for myself. My feelings I cannot pretend to describe, but many there are who remember, and will remember to their dying day, the expression of shame, confusion, and despair which my countenance exhibited as I rushed out of Court, with the curses of my ruined client darting through my brain like the stings of a million scorpions. I was ruined beyond human redemption-nay, I became a proverb, and was pointed out to young men as a fearful beacon of warning from the shoals on which I had been wrecked-so miserably wrecked.

What a cento of sleepless nights and feverish days I then past! The recollection has the painful effect of an opium-created dream or night-mare. Hunger at last broke my lethargy of despair; and again I braced myself up to seek employment. My former profession was shut against me. Could I have found practice I never could have ventured within those precincts which had witnessed my disgrace. I wished for some literary occupation, and a gleam of my former excited enthusiasm revived when obtained the situation of reporter and sub-editor to a weekly Journal. "Now," thought I, "Richard's himself again'—I am now a man of letters by profession ;”—and I dreamed of Johnson, and Savage, and Otway, and Smollet; and thought that now fortune would dawn upon me, and that I would be happy-really, actually happy. Alas! better far had I sought some less ambitious employment. There is as little congenial to a literary or cultivated mind in such a situation, as in that of the fawning slave who spends half an hour in commending the shade of a riband, or the texture of a muslin, to giddy capricious woman kind. I was not permitted to spend my time in the regions of fancy-the columns of a newspaper are composed of "sterner stuff"-fires-murders-shopliftings cattle shows-or executions, were the themes to which I was tied down, nor had I the miserable gratification of seeing my details of such events given to the public in their original form. Whenever I produced what I piqued myself on as being particularly fine, the ruthless scissors of the Gothic Editor were certain to denude and "cheat of its fair proportions," and it was sent formal and stiff into the world in such a guise that "I could not know my child."

I did not remain long in this state of literary vassalage; my duties led me frequently into the lowest and most degraded company: and doing at Rome as the pope does, I got into habits of intemperance and of course irregularity. My master frequently complained of my remissness, and threatened dismissal; and one day

66

when by my want of attention a paper published later than ours got the first account of some murder which we might have had, he 'came to the point," as he termed it, and I was dismissed at a moment's warning, with exactly ten shillings and sixpence in my pocket.

The world again was all before me, and again I had to look for a living. In my late situation I had got acquainted with the corps drammatique then in the city, whom I used to puff for the privilege of a free admission. The manager to whom I applied thought that I might be of use in drawing out his bills, and I was enrolled ir. the "troop," as it was termed by the untheatrical presbyterians among whom we had pitched our tent.

My knowledge of the drama might soon have placed me at the top of my compeers, but, as the proverb says, "that which is bred in the bone is seen in the flesh," my habits of indolent procrastination followed me even here, and could I but commit to memory my allotted number of lines I cared not for more, and trusted to the excitation of the moment to the "filling up of the picture." The merest novice in dramatic affairs must be aware how this would operate if I was seldom contemptible, I never rose, above mediocrity, and soon settled down into a minor grade of characters never to be got beyond.

:

Here then I am fixed (so far as human foresight can reach) for life. I am little better than what is technically termed a "supernumerary, and have all the toil, privation, and anxiety, without any of the honour or reputation, of my art. Though my salary is barely sufficient to procure me the coarsest food and the shelter of the most miserable hovel, I have with the proverbial thoughtlessness of my tribe, married a figurante having nothing but a scanty share of professional expertness to recommend her, and who, in addition to other vices, indulges to brutality in the bottle.

12 P. M.

I am just returned from the theatre. I have been playing a character which cost me a full ten days' study,-and I have been hissed-hissed by the most despicable of God's creation-by the canaille of the gallery! lower I cannot fall. My wife who has pawned and spent the miserable remains of my property for her cursed gin, is lying half naked on the floor in fearful convulsions of drunken laughter. My unfortunate children are shivering on bare straw-the wretch has disposed of their sorry blanket--and they are moaning for bread. There is no fire: and the window is broken to shivers in some drunken paroxysms, while the thermometer cannot be higher than 12°. Gracious God! can I be he who was complimented on his "promising abilities."

R. J. M..

THE DEATH OF MURAT

(THE following verses are almost nothing more than a versification of some passages in a touching narrative of the last moments of the ci-devant king of Naples, contained in the 16th Number of Blackwood's Magazine.}

"My hour is come!-Forget me not!-My blessing is with you;
With you my last, my fondest thought; with you my heart's adieu.
Farewell-farewell, my Caroline! my children's doting mother,
I made thee wife, and fate a queen-an hour and thou art neither;
Farewell, my fair Letitia, my love is with thee still:

Louise and Lucien, adieu; and thou, my own Achille!"

With quivering lip, but with no tear, or tear that gazers saw,

These words, to all his heart held dear, 'thus wrote the brave Murat.

Then of the locks which, dark and large, o'er his broad shoulders hung;
That streamed war-pennons in the charge, yet like caressings clung
In peace around his forehead high, which, more than diadem,
Beseemed the curls that lovingly replaced the cold hard gem;
He cut him one for wife-for child-'twas all he had to will;
But, with the regal wealth and state, he lost its heartless chill!
The iciness of alien power, what gushing love may thaw ?
-The
agony of such an hour as this-thy last-Murat!

"Comrade-though foe!-a soldier asks from thee a soldier's aid,—
They're not a warrior's only tasks that need his blood and blade-
That upon which I latest gaze-that which I fondest clasp,
When death my eye-balls wraps in haze, and stiffens my hands' grasp!
With these love-locks around it twined, say, wilt thou see them sent-
Need I say where ?-Enough!-'tis kind!-to death, then, I'm content!
O! to have found it in the field, not as a chained outlaw!
No more!-to Destiny I yield-with mightier than Murat!

They led him forth-'twas but a stride between his prison room
And where, with yet a monarch's pride, he met a felon's doom.
"Soldiers!--your muzzles to my breast will leave brief space for pain.
Strike to the heart!"-His last behest was uttered not in vain.
He turned him to the levelled tubes that held the wished-for boon;
He gazed upon some love-clasped pledge, then vollied the platoon;
And when their hold the hands gave up, the pitying gazers saw,
In the dear image of a wife, thy heart's best trait, Murat!

THE BACHELOR'S DIARY.*

I AM a single gentleman living in lodgings, and having nothing in particular to do, I pass my time in taking note of what passes within the range of my vision. How a baker's shop, which 1 never entered in my life, should become an object of deep interest to me, it is hard to say. Perhaps they who read my story may be better able to tell than I am myself. It would seem I have fallen in love with it at sight, and by seeing only what any body else may see; for certain it is I am not a Devil upon two Sticks, nor any devil at all, except a devil of a good fellow. Indeed, I have not any ground for claiming kindred with genius on the score of bodily deficiencies or mental aberrations. I am not even lame. I have the vulgar number of members, and am obliged to acknowledge I have the use of them all. I don't wear a dirty shirt when I have a clean one beside me; and I get my hair cut once a-month. I don't go without a neckcloth in summer; and I have not even originality enough to leave half my beard unshaven. I get hungry about feeding time almost as naturally as a beast; and, like the common herd of mankind, I go to bed some time after I am sleepy, and rise sometime after I am refreshed. I am therefore a very ordinary person, and am like a traveller who must ever have been a very obscure and uninteresting individual, had not either fortune or misfortune, or both, thrust distinction upon him; or a "belated peasant," who on his way home "sees, or dreams hę sees," something, the telling of which confers a momentary interest on his stolid pate; and were it not that I live in a hole in the wall, somewhat resembling the Keeper's Tower in Bridewell, from which I can see the abodes of others without being more observed myself than I choose, I should not have had any thing worth com municating.

Such being my situation, and as one cannot read or smoke all day, I began to look about me from the windows of my lodgings; and my sight, I am ashamed to confess, comes under the general sentence of sufficiency applicable to my other faculties. The first thing, of course, that I looked for was a joke, and I descried a servant girl with satin shoes, surmounted by limbs of the freshest rosy red imaginable. I could not resist mentioning it to a FrenchAmerican gentleman, who was in town at the time. It was the most unpatriotic thing I ever was guilty of; and if he happen to be of the Nodier family, I fear I may have subjected the

* From the "Edinburgh Literary Gazette."

Edinburgh ladies to a serious calamity. My amusement for one day was furnished by a white mouse in a revolving cage; and I next espied an old maid (a mature old maid of fifty or sixty,) who was almost as frightened for being seen by me when dressing, as 1 was lest I should see her. She mounted a double blind much to my relief. The ludicrous failing me, and hating the lugubrious, I cast about my regards for something snug, amusing, and comfort able, when my eyes alighted on "the Baker's Shop." Like a person who sits down for the first time in a well-constructed chair, I felt at once that I was fitted, and made a settlement accordingly; and I have ever since enjoyed comfort and competency reflected from the baker's shop and mansion.

I once lived six years in the same lodging house with a fellowlodger whom I never saw more than I have seen the Stout Gentleman. We were the only lodgers in the house, and I heard of him, as a matter of necessity, every day in some form or other. Him I knew perfectly without ever having seen him. The baker and his family I knew by seeing them without hearing of them or speaking to them-in fact, I knew them well; and am convinced that it is not necessary to hear people speak in order to be familiar with them.

I felt a little awkward in my new situation at first, like a servant who goes to a new place, or a cat making a pilgrimage to a new domicile at a Whitsunday term. For a short time nobody took any notice of me; I was a stranger to their habits, and did not know even the hours of their meals. These hours I soon learnt from observing an unwonted state of quiescence about the shopwindow and door, and a temporary disappearance of the family, down to servants and children. As to the breakfast hour, I do not choose to be more special, than merely to state that it is at some hour or other before ten. At first, too, I went a good deal at random among the customers. For instance, I could not distinguish between the stray 'prentice boy who went in to pocket a penny roll and disappeared to be seen no more, and the servant who carried in her pocket the tally-book containing a half hundred of hebdomadal accounts, all regularly scored off to the last week. But, though virtue is said to be its own reward, knowledge seems to be a step before it; for the acquisition of knowledge is often its own reward. So it was in this case. I could guess at the temper of two boys almost as correctly as Combe could have done, by observing how each expended his penny in the hour between forenoon and afternoon school; and I have seen two little girls, after a lengthened consultation, choose, the one a petticoat tail, and the other a penny roll-taste and fancy the one-size, substance, and