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ing into the nook where I was born, felt some of the sensations natural to home. As I was the largest and most powerful tenant of the stream, I had no fear of rivalry; I swept through all its depths and recesses with the delight of novelty, tasted its fresh herbage, sheltered myself from the heat under the shade of its drooping willows, and at will sported in the sun. But one day, as I was darting with the speed of an arrow and the rapture of full animation, through the centre of the stream that rippled in silver under a breeze perfumed with the fragrance of a thousand flowers, I was startled by the sight of a monster such as I had never seen before. It was of indescribable ugliness. Instead of the brilliant sheathing, the diamond scale, and the rainbow painting, to which I had been accustomed in the tribes of the ocean, its clothing was of the colour of the dingiest mire. Instead of the lightning rapidity, ease and grace of the fin, it rowed, or rather tottered, on two singularly shapeless props; its employ ment seemed as idiotic as its figure was deformed. It stood sometimes gazing at the sun, sometimes at the water, stretching out its arms alternately with a look of dull intenseness, and holding a long reed which it helplessly waved back and forward, like one of the willows under the breeze. My first sensation was alarm, but I saw that the monster dreaded the water, and I despised him for his impotence. My next was disgust at his deformity. I gave a final glance, dashed the waters with my tail in scorn, and darted away. But let my folly be all told. That glance was fatal. I saw at the same moment, just touching the waters, one of the most delightful flies that imagination had ever shaped for the banquet of an epicure. I was an epicure. And his blue wing, purple body, and golden crest would have fascinated the most self-denying eye. I was young, rash, ardent, and hungry. I made but one spring at the temptation, and seized it at the moment. But to my inexpressible surprise I felt a singularly sharp pang in the very act of seizure. I plunged instantly into the depths of the river. But the pang was there and every where. Still I plunged on. But I suddenly found a strange check. At once furious and frightened, I plunged on. But the check grew more powerful as I grew exhausted. And at last, yielding to

fate, I found myself rapidly drawn back through the channel which I had traversed with such speed. The sensation in my throat now grew more torturing than ever. At last, judge of my horror when I saw the monster standing on the bank above me. His miry covering seemed more miry than ever, the props on which he tottered more tottering, but his countenance was distended with a hideous look of triumph. It was not hunger like my own about to be satiated, for the wretch had a rotundity of stomach which showed that he was already gorged. It was not poverty about to make gain of me, for I saw it throw coin to a crowd of young monsters standing on naked props, to venture into the water where I lay and seize me. It was sport. That detestable passion which belongs to such two-legged monsters alone; the unaccountable disregard of others' pain, the unaccountable enjoyment of seeing a creature endowed with a thousand faculties of life and pleasure finishing them all in agony. I was in torture. But the more I writhed the more the monster was evidently delighted. Every fibre of my throat was torn. I felt alternately the deadliest chill and the most scorching flame. My eyes started from their sockets. My heart panted in wild spasms. My flesh quivered as if poison had been dropped on every scale. A sudden and violent pull, which forced the steel into my very brain, dragged me on the bank. Here I felt a new scene of misery.. In the next moment my whole frame burned as if coated in fire. The air, no longer softened by the water, seemed to me all flame. The sun, untempered by the shade, looked a vast furnace stooping from the sky. The horrors of that moment defy all conception. Fortunately they were brief-life could bear no more I gave one wild convulsion, and lost all sense of being. Yet as I gave my last groan I could faintly hear a 'hurrah,' and the words, a five-and-twenty pounds fish at least-capital sport!' uttered by the crowd of monsters in mire round me.

"How long I remained in this condition I have no means of knowing; but I began to feel a sudden sensation of life. I looked round and saw myself in a basket on a bed of wet grass, whose coolness and moisture had probably restored me. I now saw the

monster take the basket from his back, and, laying it on the ground, wipe his heavy brows, and mutter 'confoundedly hot, and five miles more to walk. It was good sport, no doubt, to catch this fine fellow; but I am sick of fish. I have had fish enough since I came on this stupid visit to make me loathe the sight of it on the table. Well, I dine at the corporation feast to-day. This fellow will cut a figure among the turtle and turbot. To the corporation he shall go.' As I looked at the monster's bloated visage, and heard his reckless speech, a throb of indignation shot through me. What! was I to be curtailed of my existence, mutilated and mangled only to fill the stomachs of a herd of clowns, already pampered with gluttony? Indignation gave me new strength. I made one tremendous bound, sprang up in the monster's face, and to my measureless joy felt that I descended in the river. One thing alone was now wanting to my triumph. It was not wanting long. The monster, startled by my parting blow, lost his balance, toppled off the bank, and fell headlong into the stream. He roared like a bull, and struggled like a sea-horse. But the stream was strong, and I had the pleasure of accompanying him, side by side, for several hundred yards down the river. At length the crowd of monsters whom his cries had brought, running along the bank, dragged him out in the midst of peals of laughter. He was more miry than ever, his face was all duckweed and dismay; and without basket, rod, or hat, terrified, dripping, and half drowned, he looked the most helpless and ridiculous of all possible monsters. I left him, with a dash of my tail that ploughed up the water, in scorn, and sailed away for my old loved haunts in the Atlantic. From time to time I turned to gaze on the scene of the monster's discomfiture, where I saw the crowd carrying him away, and uttering roars of laughter, till all was lost in distance and silence; and I inhaled alone the living breeze, and saw before me the sapphire stream bending over the majesty of ocean."

In Sir Walter Scott's Memoirs by Lockhart, some slight mention is made of a dinner to which he was invited, less as the lion, than to be one of a party of lions. All were conversationists, the den was full, and the feeder

did his best to stir up his menagerie ; among the rest was "Conversation Sharpe." How this trite and affected person ever attained the name, trifling as it now is, must be left to the discrimination of his trifling coterie. But he has left a legacy of his talent behind him, and nothing on earth or under it, can be more dry, formal, or shallow. His book has buried his reputation, it has carried his little buoyancy down like a mill-stone. No man since Sheridan has actually been a good converser. A mere man of anecdote may be amusing but he is not a good converser, he is a walking jest-book, an edition of Joe Millar in coat and breeches; a reciter of scraps out of Dryden or Pope, with now and then a stanza from Byron, to show that he has not grown too old for the rising generation, is not a good converser, but a walking commonplace book, a mutilated copy of "the elegant extracts." A repeater of the reminiscences of the last century who plagues the table still with newspaper paragraphs, new fifty years ago, assumes a superiority for having lived in the days of the departed great, though he lived no more connected with them than a rat in one of their stables; the man who rises in his chair and settles all questions by, "Sir, I saw Mr Fox, nay, saw him frequently; he was a short man, with a round stomach and a large head; I heard him speak, sir, and I shall never hear such eloquence again, though the one half of his speech was lost in his own sputtering, and the other half in the applause of the house. This reminiscent is not a good converser, but a walking turnpike, through which the great and little pass alike, and leave nothing but halfpenny tickets behind. But incomparably the most alarming of the whole tribe, the bore par excellence, is the academic, whose life, between the college and the churchyard, seems to be one great gulf, the world a nonentity, and no image in his mind but the absurdities of some head of a college dead, &c., fifty years ago, and as obscure in his life as ever he was in his grave. The quoter of Horace, to prove that a venison-pasty is not a plumpudding, deliberately talking Aristotle over his sherry, and in his moments of confidence mouthing the first half dozen lines of the Iliad; this man is not a good converser, but a public nuisance, and ought to be extin

guished by petition to the two houses of the legislature; he is a fly leaf of Lilly's Grammar, scratched over with the autographs of booby scholarship.

Sir James Mackintosh was an ambitious converser, and therefore not a good one. He overdid his work, had a prodigious memory, with prodigious quotations, ticketed like an attorney's pigeon-holes, and between long recitations from Dryden, and forgotten fragments of the Edinburgh Review, was among the most innocent and intolerable men of his time. Sir Walter Scott was clever in all things, and therefore in conversation. All his recollections were Scottish, and though amusing and characteristic, Englishmen were but slowly brought to give up their souls to the memories of the Hopes, the Blairs, and Mackenzies of Auld Reekie. Yet there was a perpetual animation about Sir Walter, a readiness to be happy, and make everybody else happy; an absence of all discoverable sense of self, and a kind of conversational goodwill to all round the table, that made him always pleasing. He had the true conversational temper. No affectation of superiority, no harshness of remark, no severity in looking at men or times, no occasional sullenness. He was always in the vein, and never without some pleasant anecdote, just of the right length, and just odd enough to amuse. It is a thousand pities that in the latter years of his life he did not write his "Recollections." It would have been one of the most amusing pieces of nature and eccentricity in the world. But he was no wit. His pleasantries were of the memory, and except by the quaintness which seems to be impressed on the Scottish idiom, and the dry humour, which seems equally national, he seldom" set the table in a roar.

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The Marquis Wellesley would be a good converser, except for the misfortune of his having gone to Eton. The "fifth form" rises before him as

the Weird Sisters before Macbeth. It perpetually molests, mystifies, and masters him. He quotes all through his waking hours. If he drops asleep, which he does of late, in the best company, he slides from a discussion on Perigord Pie into a sarcasm from Juvenal, or an episode from Silius Italicus. His waking hours are rendered unhappy to himself and mankind by alternate citations from Martial and the " Marattah war." But, of all men, living or dead, Sheridan was the best converser. Poor Richard! poor, indeed! thy life was an old "almanack," a catalogue of sunrises and sunsets, fasts and feasts, and all not worth a penny when the year was done. His was a Whig life; professional patriotism, useless ability, lip honesty, and House of Commons honour. But his nature was Tory; he had not an item of malice in his composition. He loved England and Englishmen ; he would have stood by the Constitution, if he had not been a pauper all his life, and had, in the turf phrase, not a leg to stand on. Unhappy Lazarus, at the gate of the Dives of Devonshire House; living on Whig crumbs all his wretched life, and at its end left to any dog that would, to lick his sores. But he was the wit of wits, after all; and the departing genius of conversation crushing together the bones and brains of all the conversationists before or since, ought to build a monument of them over the spot where this pleasant and unhappy, powerful and feeble, brilliant and extinguished luminary of the table, the Commons, and the Stage, is wedded to the worm.

Sheridan, too, had his conversational faults. "Nemo omnibus horis." Which, being interpreted, is, no one can be always telling the best stories, and saying the most sparkling things in the world. He was uneven. He was either all cloud or all sunshine. But from the cloud sometimes shot a flash that was more brilliant than all sunshine.

THE CABINET.*

"Lando manentem."-HORACE.

We have been much gratified by this little performance, the first edition of which, we confess, had escaped our notice. There is a spirit of frankness and candour about it, and an absence of all disguise in the exposition of the principles of the party from which it emanates, which are worthy of all acceptation. It contains, in fact, the existing philosophy of Whiggism reduced to its elements, and conveyed in the popular form of a lyric operetta, instead of being embodied in prosy pamphlets, or dreary quarterly manifestoes in the Edinburgh Review. To such an extent, indeed, is the candour of the author carried, that we were at first a little puzzled to discover whether the poem was really the production of a bona fide Whig, or of some wicked Tory wit, who, like Lord Palmerston of yore, in his celebrated new Whig Guide, had adopted this convenient vehicle of satire against his political opponents. A careful comparison, however, of the sentiments which the author attributes to the personages of his piece, with the opinions avowed by the leaders of the present Administration"in their place in Parliament," has satisfied us that the author is what he professes to be-a genuine Whig, in fact, "a Hebrew of the Hebrews;" and that the work, notwithstanding the comic mask which the author áffects to wear, has its serious side, and is in truth little more than a poetical version of the speeches of the different members of Government, as recorded in the Mirror of Parliament. How far the publication may be made with the sanction of Ministers we know not; though, from the characteristic nature of the speeches and lyrics assigned to the leading actors in the scene, we are strongly inclined to think that some of them at least have been written, or at least revised, by the parties concerned; and that the work may be regarded as an experimental publication made with the view of ascertaining how far the public mind is yet prepared for the reception of

those simple and undeviating prin-
ciples by which the views of the pre-
sent Administration have been and are
likely to be guided.
We look upon it

as a sort of light pilot, sent out to
show how the wind sits, before ven-
turing to launch the real balloon.
Should the brochure be favourably
received, the work will no doubt be
claimed by its true authors: if the
public, on the contrary, be startled by
the naked simplicity of the Ministerial
creed, poor Mr Dibdin will probably
be left to bear the pelting of the storm
as he best may.

In the mean-time, it is delightful to see in what a spirit of true philosophy these little pleasantries are composed. The authors do not affect to conceal from themselves that they are the subjects of general ridicule; they are the first to admit, that with the exception of their immediate dependents, and of those who agree to march through Coventry with them in the mean-time, that they may turn them to the rear, and make use of them for their own ends afterwards, they are despised and rejected of all men; but they do all this with such a poor-devil air of openness and bonhommie, and bear with such resignation the visitation of national contempt, that they absolutely disarm our resentment. "Do not beat me," said, or looked, Sterne's ass, "but if you will you may." It was impossible to beat him under the circumstances. So it is with us on perusing this good-humoured Ministerial confession. The foot which was about to be "unsupportably advanced" is withdrawn ; the knout drops from our hand; solvuntur risu tabule,—and the culprit leaves the bar with a verdict of not proven," nodding and cocking his eye to the jury" as if nothing had happened.

The author, as we have said, has chosen to throw his subject into a dramatic form, and has selected as the time when the unflinching principles of his party might be supposed to be displayed to the greatest advantage

The Cabinet; a Downing Street Operetta; in one Act. The Music selected from various Composers. By Thomas Dibdin the Younger, Second Edition. London.

1837.

the Ministerial muster in Lord Melbourne's after the triumphant majority of five upon the English Church-Rates Bill. The fears, hopes, and consolations of men in office ;-the statement and enforcement of the grand principles by which they are determined to be governed; the contrast between the weak and wavering counsels of those who, almost in spite of themselves, are compelled to still avow a lingering attachment to decency and consistency of conduct, and the firmness of those who follow the surer guidance of self-interest through good report and bad, afford room for some scenes of considerable interest and power.

There is one point in Mr Dibdin's performance by which it is favourably distinguished from the crude and irregular productions with which our theatres are at present deluged; viz. the attention which he pays to the unities. Unity of place, in particular, to which, since the prejudice produced by Dr Johnson's preface to Shakspeare, too little attention we fear has been paid, is with him a paramount consideration. His scene is laid in Downing Street, once for all; and from that no consideration will induce his characters to stir. Unity of plot and unity of interest this little drama also possesses in perfection. From first to last the characters think and speak of one thing only, namely, how best to rob me the King's Exchequer," with the smallest possible equivalent of services rendered in return. We had at first thought that the author had even discovered a new unity, viz. the unity of sex,-the personages of the piece being, nominally at least, of the masculine gender; but the pretensions of Lord Holland, at least, to the character of an old woman, may be stated to us by a friend to be so plausible, as to make it doubtful to our minds whether Mr Dibdin can fairly take credit for the successful achievement of the dramatic novelty at which he appears to have aimed.

The unity of time, it will easily be imagined, has not occasioned the author much difficulty; since the whole action takes place in the course of a single petit souper at Lord Melbourne's after the division.

While admitting the author's merits in regard to the unities, we are bound

in fairness to state, that the recitative of his piece, as is too generally the case with these musical performances, "is naught." It has been obviously "slobbered up in haste," being "horribly stuffed with epithets," which have no meaning or purpose beyond that of filling up the line, and enabling the poet to conform with apparent decency to the exigencies of the musical composer. It is, in short, precisely such bombastic ten-syllabled trash as we have lately been compelled to encounter in the Duchess de la Valiere, but which, after the questionable success of that experiment, we trust we shall not be again subjected to in the long-threatened drama of Cromwell." We think, therefore, we shall do a service both to our readers and to the author, by confining our extracts from his operetta to the lyrical portion of the piece. It is a department of poetry for which he seems to us to have a considerable turn, and in which we are inclined to think (certainly with no party prejudices in his favour) that he has been tolerably successful.

The piece opens with a duo between Lord Morpeth and Spring Rice, who have just entered, not a little disconcerted by the miserable display of the night, and who, in the first moments of consternation, give vent to the gloomiest views as to the ministerial prospects. There is a wonderful coincidence, in some respects, and contrast in others, between this desponding effusion of the honourable gentlemen and the triumphant opening duet of Noodle and Doodle in Tom Thumb. Indeed, we observe that Mr Dibdin, in several of the lyrics with which the piece is interspersed, has obviously derived considerable assistance from some of our popular afterpieces; such as "Tom Thumb" and "The Forty Thieves ;" and that, in particular, he has been not a little indebted to the great lyric poet of his party, the translator of Anacreon, whose manner he has more than once copied with considerable success. In this instance, indeed, he has pretty plainly indicated the source from which the idea of his opening has been taken, since, with all the candour of Joseph Surface, he actually attaches the somewhat ludicrous adjuncts of Noodle and Doodle to the names of the two Ministerial performers.

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