take

Whenever it gives them a chance at a steak :

Sixty-two second Washingtons: two or three Jacksons:

And so many everythings-else that it

racks one's

Poor memory too much to continue the list, Especially now they no longer exist ;I would merely observe that you've taken to giving

The puffs that belong to the dead to the living,

And that somehow your trump-of-contemporary-doom's tones

Is tuned after old dedications and tombstones.

Here the critic came in and a thistle presented -*

From a frown to a smile the god's features relented,

As he stared at his envoy, who, swelling with pride,

To the god's asking look, nothing daunted, replied, "You're surprised, I suppose, I was absent so long,

But your godship respecting the lilies

So, musing a moment, he turned to the crowd,

And, clearing his voice, spoke as follows aloud:

"My friends, in the happier days of the muse,

We were luckily free from such things as reviews ;

Then naught came between with its fog to make clearer

The heart of the poet to that of his hearer;

Then the poet brought heaven to the people, and they

Felt that they, too, were poets in hearing his lay;

Then the poet was prophet, the past in his soul

Precreated the future, both parts of one whole;

Then for him there was nothing too great or too small,

For one natural deity sanctified all; Then the bard owned no clipper and meter of moods

Save the spirit of silence that hovers and broods

O'er the seas and the mountains, the rivers and woods;

He asked not earth's verdict, forgetting the clods,

His soul soared and sang to an audience of gods;

'T was for them that he measured the thought and the line,

And shaped for their vision the perfect design,

With as glorious a foresight, a balance as true,

As

swung out the worlds in the infinite blue;

tenance glistening,

Eurydice stood like a beacon unfired, Which, once touched with flame, will leap heav'nward inspired

And waited with answering kindle to mark

The first gleam of Orpheus that pained the red Dark.

Then painting, song, sculpture did more than relieve

The need that men feel to create and believe,

And as, in all beauty, who listens with love

Hears these words oft repeated-beyond and above,'

So these seemed to be but the visible sign

Of the grasp of the soul after things more divine;

They were ladders the Artist erected to climb

O'er the narrow horizon of space and of time,

And we see there the footsteps by which

out Taboo!

And while he is wondering what he shall do,

Since each suggests opposite topics for song,

They all shout together you're right! and you're wrong!

"Nature fits all her children with something to do,

He who would write and can't write, can surely review,

Can set up a sinall booth as critic and sell us his

Petty conceit and his pettier jealousies ; Thus a lawyer's apprentice, just out of his teens,

Will do for the Jeffrey of six magazines;

Having read Johnson's lives of the poets half through,

There's nothing on earth he's not competent to;

He reviews with as much nonchalance as he whistles,

He goes through a book and just picks out the thistles;

It matters not whether he blame or commend,

If he's bad as a foe, he's far worse as a

[I HAVE observed, reader (bene- or male- | volent, as it may happen), that it is customary to append to the second editions of books, and to the second works of authors, short sentences commendatory of the first, under the title of Notices of the Press. These, I have been given to understand, are procurable at certain established rates, payment being made either in money or advertising patronage by the publisher, or by an adequate outlay of servility on the part of the author. Considering these things with myself, and also that such notices are neither intended, nor generally believed, to convey any real opinions, being a purely ceremonial accompaniment of literature, and resembling certificates to the virtues of various morbiferal panaceas, I conceived that it would be not only more economical to prepare a sufficient number of such myself, but also more immediately subservient to the end in view to prefix them to this our primary edition rather than await the contingency of a second, when they would seem to be of small utility. To delay attaching the bobs until the second attempt at flying the kite would indicate but a slender experience in that useful art. Neither has it escaped my notice, nor failed to afford me matter of reflection, that, when a circus or a caravan is about to visit Jaalam, the initial step is to send forward large and highly ornamented bills of performance to be hung in the bar-room and the post-office. These having been sufficiently gazed at, and beginning to lose their attractiveness except for the flies, and, truly, the boys also (in whom I find it impossible to repress, even during school-hours, certain oral and telegraphic communications concerning the expected show), upon some fine morning the band enters in a gayly painted wagon, or triumphal chariot, and with noisy advertisement, by means of brass, wood, and sheepskin, makes the circuit of our startled village streets. Then, as the exciting sounds draw nearer and nearer, do I de

siderate those eyes of Aristarchus, "whose looks were as a breeching to a boy." Then do I perceive, with vain regret of wasted opportunities, the advantage of a pancratic or pantechnic education, since he is most reverenced by my little subjects who can throw the cleanest summerset or walk most securely upon the revolving cask. The story of the Pied Piper becomes for the first time credible to me (albeit confirmed by the Hameliners dating their legal instruments from the period of his exit), as I behold how those strains, without pretence of magical potency, bewitch the pupillary legs, nor leave to the pedagogic an entire self-control. For these reasons, lest my kingly prerogative should suffer diminution, I prorogue my restless commons, whom I follow into the street, chiefly lest some mischief may chance befall them. After the manner of such a band, I send forward the following notices of domestic manufacture, to make brazen proclamation, not unconscious of the advantage which will accrue, if our little craft, cymbula sutilis, shall seem to leave port with a clipping breeze, and to carry, in nautical phrase, a bone in her mouth. Nevertheless, I have chosen, as being more equitable, to prepare some also sufficiently objurgatory, that readers of every taste may find a dish to their palate. I have modelled them upon actually existing specimens, preserved in my own cabinet of natural curiosities. One, in particular, I had copied with tolerable exactness from a notice of one of my own discourses, which, from its superior tone and appearance of vast experience, I concluded to have been written by a man at least three hundred years of age, though I recollected no existing instance of such antediluvian longevity. Nevertheless, I afterwards discovered the author to be a young gentleman preparing for the ministry under the direction of one of my brethren in a neighboring town, and whom I had once instinctively corrected in a