upon us in the midst of that dreary moss; and at the sound of our quaking voice, fell down with clasped hands at our feet-"My father's dead!" Had the hut put already on the strange, dim, desolate look of mortality? For people came walking fast down the braes, and in a little while there was a group round us, and we bore her back again to her dwelling in our arms. How could she have lived-an utter orphan-in such a world! The holy power that is in Innocence would for ever have remained with her; but Innocence longs to be away, when her sister Joy has departed; and 'tis sorrowful to see the one on earth, when the other has gone to Heaven! This sorrow none of us had long to see; for though a flower, when withered at the root, and doomed ere eve to perish, may yet look to the careless eye the same as when it blossomed in its pride, its leaves, still green, are not as once they were,-its bloom, though fair, is faded,—and at set of sun, the dews shall find it in decay, and fall unfelt on all its petals. Ere Sabbath came, the orphan child was dead. Methinks we see now her little funeral. Her birth had been the humblest of the humble; and though all in life had loved her, it was thought best that none should be asked to the funeral of her and her father, but two or three friends; the old clergyman himself walked at the head of the father's coffin-we at the head of the daughter's-for this was granted unto our exceeding love;-and thus passed away for ever the Blind Beauty of the Moor! GOOD LIVING THE CAUSE OF BAD WRITING. "We say it is a fleshly style, when there is much periphrases, and circuit of words; and when with more than enough it grows fat and corpulent.-Ben Jonson's Discoveries. and other nations reverence it as the seat of thought, whence, in all probability, beasts with two stomachs came originally to be called ruminating animals par excellence. Where else than to the stomach should we look for the primary cause of that irritability which, in all ages, has been the distinguishing characteristic of authors; as well as for that morbid state of the intellectual faculties by which they are so often afflicted, and of which the evidence is sometimes so lamentably seen in the inferiority of their writings? Authors are no longer Grub-street garreteers, invigorating their minds by Spartan temperance, and their bodies by inhaling the pure and classical air of an Attic lodging. The "mens sana in corpore sano," may now be prayed for in vain. Payment by the sheet of nine feet four has tempted them to scribble by the furlong; they have acquired riches, money has made them luxurious, luxury has deranged their intestine economy, the sympathising soul "embodies and embrutes," and thus do I come round to the title of my paper, and most logically and incontestably prove that good living is the cause of bad writing. A ready clue will be afforded us to the superiority of the ancient writers over the moderns, if we recollect that necessity is the mother of invention, and that invention has always been deemed the test, the experimentum crucis, the sine qua non of a great poet. What says Shakspeare, who, in confirmation of his own dictum, never wrote a line after he retired to Stratford and fattened upon aldermanic fare: "Fat paunches make lean pates, and grosser bits Make rich the ribs, but bankerout the wits." In a medical work now before me, containing some excellent maxims for men of letters, the author observes that the most successful writers have been starved into excellence and celebrity. Homer begged his bread; Cicero is described by Plutarch as being at one time of his life extremely lean and slender, and having such a weakness in his stomach, that he could eat but little; Tasso was often obliged to borrow half-a-crown for a week's subsistence; Cervantes wrote his immortal work in prison; the author of "Gil Blas" lived in great poverty; Milton sold his "Paradise Lost" for ten pounds; Otway-but there is no end to the list. Read the Calamities of Authors, and you will find abundant proof in almost every page that there is no Muse or magic, no Pegasus or Parnassus, no Helicon or Hippocrene, like hunger. "It is well ascertained," says the medical writer before me, that a spare diet tends very much to augment delicacy of feeling, liveliness of imagination, quickness of apprehension, and acuteness of judgment. The majority of our most esteemed works have been composed by men whose limited circumstances compelled them to adopt very frugal repasts; and we have much reason to suppose that their scanty fare contributed in no small degree to the excellence of their productions."* So convinced is our worthy physician of the fact, that he earnestly recommends a dose of medicine to authors before they engage in any particular study or composition; and is obliging enough to give recipes proportioned to the intensity of the application required. We now see the reason why the ancients made Apollo the god of medicine as well as of poetry; so true is it that there is a hidden wisdom in the most trivial detail of their mythology, if we could but unveil it. Is it not notorious to the most superficial pathologist, either from personal experience or pure observation, that gluttony stupifies the reasoning faculties, and that drunkenness destroys them altogether? and how could this result occur unless the stomach were the seat of the intellect, the great sensorium of the human frame? That the fumes of these immane potations, alembicised in the intestines, ascend into the head, and thus disorder the ratiocinative powers, is a mere medical conceit, a fond imagining of the theorists, unsupported by proof, and even unwarranted by analogy. Let our literati, then, cultivate the griping of a hungry stomach as an infallible test of inspiration, and of the presence of the mens divinior, prompting all sorts of nimble, fiery, delectable, and spiritual fancies; while the Philodeipnos, who indulges in poluphagia and poluposia, (I wish to avoid the vulgar terms of gluttony and inebriety,) will never be classical in his compositions; his mind will become empty as his body fills, and he will produce heavy, somnolent, dull, leaden writings, manifestly engendered "crasså Minerva," under the influence of a fat Minerva. Even air, light and unsubstantial as such a food may appear, except to a cameleon, may be of too pinguid a quality; and the ancient Boeotians were thought to be stupified by the undue fatness of the element they breathed-" Bootum in crasso juraris aëre natum." a pot-bellied spirit, or lazy lightning. Obesity is a deadly foe to genius; in carneous and unwieldy bodies the spirit is like a little gudgeon in a large fryingpan of fat, which is either totally absorbed, or tastes of nothing but the lard. Let no man attempt to write who has a protuberant stomach; let no man reckon upon immortality who cannot distinctly feel and reckon his own ribs; for the thinnest bow shoots the farthest, and the leanest horse generally wins the race. If I were a publisher, I should invariably fight shy of the "fair round belly with good capon lined," and immediately offer a handsome price to the Living Skeleton for his memoirs. They would have a run, and they would deserve it; for we may be assured that they would exhibit none of the faults pointed out in my motto. All bone, muscle, and nerve, they would be doubly acceptable to a public which has lately been overwhelmed with such a mass of flesh, fat, and flummery. Nothing fat ever yet enlightened the world; for even in a tallow candle the illumination springs from the thin wick. So far, however, from wishing to confine men of letters to a diet of air, however unctuous and satisfactory, the physician to whom I have referred is willing to allow them over and above, during the course of the twenty-four hours, twelve ounces of solid, and twenty ounces of liquid food, after which it will behove them to make a change in their intestine punctuation, and to take care that their colon comes to a full stop. A single mouthful beyond this limitation, even of Cotelette à l'Epigramme, will infallibly injure the point of their writings, and stultify them with ponderous and phlegmatic dulness. The writer in question cautions authors not to be "sleepless themselves to make their readers sleep," but to slumber for at least eight hours at a stretch, as the surest method of avoiding somnolency in their productions-a piece of advice which most patients, whether literary or not, would be very happy to follow. Example, which is infinitely better than precept, will abundantly justify the wisdom of this starving system. Our greatest writers have been little, attenuated men, sto- How comes it that in the upper machless, meagre, lean, and lath-like; classes of life, among men possessing beings who have half-spiritualized "all appliances and means to boot," themselves by keeping matter in due who ought to be specially qualified by subordination to mind, corporeally tes- liberal education and the full enjoytifying that the sword has worn out ment of leisure, we find so few writers the scabbard, and that the predominant of any sort, and scarcely one of marksoul has o'erinformed its tegument ed eminence. With all his industry, of clay." Look at the busts and por- Walpole's list of royal and noble traits of Cicero, Demosthenes, Vol- authors presents but a meagre show taire, Pope, and a hundred others, in point of number, and not a particuwhose minds have meagred their bo- larly creditable one as to talent. dies till they became almost as ethe- The "Lords of fat Evesham and of real as the ardent spirit they enshrin- Lincoln Fen," and our other wealthy ed, is it not manifest that they have agriculturists, have never attempted to the true form and physiognomy of in- cultivate the soil of Parnassus. What tellectual preeminence? Lord Byron can explain this apparent anomaly, never wrote so well as when he was but the reflection that their station in macerating himself by rigid absti- life, placing every luxurious indulgence nence; and the most eminent of our within their reach, has tempted them to living writers are all men of temperate make their own stomachs the tomb of living and a spare bodily habit. A their own genius? Hecatombs of fish, corpulent intellectualist is a contra- flesh, and fowl have they offered up to diction in terms, a palpable catachre- this insatiable ventricle, stifling in sis. One might as well talk of a lead- their fumes the very germs of talent, en kite, a sedentary will-o'-the-wisp, and clouding or extinguishing almost every spark of intellect. Happy they who have plied their teeth so incessantly that they have found no time to put the pen in motion, for the few who have rashly essayed to combine gastronomic with literary pursuits, have only offered a more signal example that good living is invariably the cause of bad writing. Our oldest authors are the best, and why? Not only because they were the poorest, but because they wrote in Roman Catholic times, when fasts, and lent, and spare diet were rigidly observed. Is it upon record that any work of celebrity was ever begun during the Carnival, or that any of our civic dignitaries, conversant with feasts, festivals, and aldermanic excesses, have distinguished themselves as literati? I pause for a reply. Even poor Elkanah Settle, the last of the city laureats, unable to resist the stultifying influence of gluttonous repasts, as his Inauguration Odes attest, finally gorged himself into such a lamentable plight, that he had just wit enough left to enact a dragon at Bartholomew Fair, and to hiss, and spit fire, for the amusement of the populace. Let our gormandizing and tippling scribblers have the fate of Elkanah perpetually before their mouths; let them pray for some physician's wand, like that which whisked away the dishes from the expectant jaws of Sancho Panza, if they wish to preserve their faculties unimpaired, and to write something that the world shall "not willingly let die." In the mysterious reciprocal action of the mind upon the body, and of the body upon the mind, it is impossible to say how intimately the mere quality of our food, without reference to its quantity, may affect every thing that we write. By longing for some particular viand or fruit, a mother will, through some inscrutable process of nature, indelibly stamp it upon her unborn child; and may not men, by the kind of nutriment upon which they subsist, while teeming with some literary work, communicate a similar impress to the offspring of their brain? Diversity of diet may even plausibly explain the various characteristics of national literature. The writings of a Frenchman, habitually living upon soupe maigre, a vol-au-vent, and an omelette, graced with Chablis or champagne, will be naturally light, mercurial, playful, sparkling, and frothy; while those of an Englishman, dining upon beef and plum-pudding, made into a heavy quagmire with port and porter, will be of a more solid texture perhaps, but gross, ponderous, grave, plethoric. By indulging in sour krout, the Germans have become a nation of critics; water-zootje and red herrings are legible in every line of the Dutch literature; macaroni and vermicelli have imparted their own frivolous and unsubstantial character to the writings of the Italians; while from the wild birds and wild beasts which constitute the prevalent food of the north, we may plainly deduce the singular wildness of the Scandinavian mythology and poetry. Bearing these incontrovertible facts in mind, let every author endeavor to adapt his food to the nature of his intended composition; above all, and under every circumstance, attending to that golden rule of Milton, who exemplified in his works the glorious results of his own recommendation. THE CHILD'S FIRST GRIEF. BY MRS. HEMANS. On! call my brother back to me, The summer comes, with flower and bee, 25 ATHENEUM, VOL. 1, 3d series. The Butterfly is glancing bright I care not now to chase its flight- The flowers run wild-the flowers we sow'd Go! thou must play alone, my boy! Around our garden-tree; Our vine is drooping with its loadOh! call him back to me ! He would not hear thy voice, fair child, He may not come to thee, The face that once like spring-time smil'd On earth no more thou'lt see. A rose's brief, bright life of joySuch unto him was given; Thy brother is in heaven. And has he left his birds and flowers? And must I call in vain? And through the long long summer hours Will he not come again? And by the brook, and in the glade, THE NEW UNIVERSITY OF LONDON. On Wednesday, October 1, the University of London, without a bull from the Pope, without a blessing from the Church, and without a beam of favor from the King, was opened for the first Session. The following description of the Buildings will enable our readers to appreciate the admirable arrangements by which in their erection economy has been made to go hand in hand with utility, and former experiences rendered subservient to the mutual accommodation of teachers and pupils. The chief access to the University is by Gower Street, Bedford Square, but there are approaches from the New Road and Tottenham Court Road. The elevation of the principal or western front, which is wholly of Portland stone, exhibits a chaste and most beautiful example of the Corinthian order. It extends (including the wings, which when built will project 210 feet towards Gower Street,) 450 feet. The central compartment is devoted on the ground floor to a magnificent staircase, composed of several flights at right angles to each other, and above, to a portico consisting of ten columns in front and two in flank supporting a plain but well proportioned pediment. The façade on each side displays a range of characteristic pilasters above, and a happily applied specimen of horizontal rustic work below. A very effective series of wreaths and guttæ enriches, and lends relief to the space between the tiers of windows. The whole is surmounted by a circular dome 36 feet in diameter and 52 feet high, supporting a peristyle of the order, and terminated by a cross. The wings when finished will each be furnished with a similar portico, and with a dome of the same description, but of inferior dimensions. The principal entrance to the building is through the portico; the ascent to which (18 feet) is made by the grand staircase alluded to. Entering the vestibule, which is octagonal, the effect is remarkably imposing. Immediately opposite, and jutting 90 feet from the back wall, a most splendid saloon, called par excellence The Hall, attracts the attention of the visitor; it is intended for public examinations and meetings of ceremony. On the right appears the Great Library, 120 feet by 50, with a gallery round, supported by cast iron pillars, enveloped in imitation Scagliola. Besides the windows on each side, this magnificent apartment is furnished with lanternal lights from the roof, or rather from the ceiling, there being horizontal pannels of ground or frosted glass, so arranged as to harmonize with the plaster decorations. There is a small Library at the further end of this, calculated to contain 12,000 volumes. On the left is the Museum of Natural History, similar in all respects to the Library, but terminated by the Theatre of Anatomy, in place of the small Library. The doors presented by the other sides of the octagon lead to staircases, or form the entrances to professors' rooms. On the ground floor, immediately beneath the Hall, and entering from |