whip as they go by. If you wish to know what rain and dust can do, you should look at his old hat. There is an indescribably placid and paternal look in the position of his corduroy knees and old top-boots on the foot-board, with their pointed toes and never-cleaned soles. His beau-idéal of appearance is a frock-coat, with mother-o'-pearl buttons, a striped yellow waistcoat, and a flower in his mouth.

But all our praises why for Charles and Robert?
Rise, honest Mews, and sing the classic Bobart.

Is the quadrijugal virtue of that learned person still extant That Olympic and Baccalaureated charioteer ?-That best educated and most erudite of coachmen, of whom Dominie Sampson is alone worthy to speak? That singular punning and driving commentary on the Sunt quos curriculo collegisse? In short, the worthy and agreeable Mr. Bobart, Bachelor of Arts, who drove the Oxford stage some years ago, capped verses and the front of his hat with equal dexterity, and read Horace over his brandy-and-water of an evening? We had once the pleasure of being beaten by him in that capital art, he having brought up against us an unusual number of those cross-armed letters, as puzzling to verse-cappers as iron-cats unto cavalry, ycleped X's; which said warfare he was pleased to call to mind in after-times, unto divers of our comrades. The modest and natural greatness with which he used to say "Yait" to his horses, and then turn round with his rosy gills, and an eye like a fish, and give out the required verse, can never pass away from us, as long as verses or horses run.

Of the hackney-coach we cannot make as short work, as many persons like to make of it in reality. Perhaps it is partly a sense of the contempt it undergoes, which induces us to endeavour to make the best of it. But it has its merits, as we shall show presently. In the account of its demerits, we have been anticipated by a new, and we are sorry to say a very good, poetess, of the name of Lucy VL-, who has favoured us with a sight of a manuscript poem," in which they are related with great nicety and sensitiveness.

Reader. What Sir, sorry to say that a lady is a good poetess!

Indicator. Only inasmuch, Madam, as the lady gives such authority to the antisocial view of this subject, and will not agree with us as to the beatitude of the hackney-coach.-But hold-upon turning to the manuscript again, we find that the objections are put into the mouth of a dandy courtier. This makes a great difference. The hackney resumes all which it had lost in the good graces of the fair authoress. The only wonder is, how the courtier could talk so well. Here is the passage.

By Mr. Keats. The manuscript purports to have been written by a Miss Lucy Vaughan Lloyd.

Eban, untempted by the Pastry-cooks,
(Of Pastry he got store within the Palace,)
With hasty steps, wrapp'd cloak, and solemn looks,
Incognito upon his errand sallies,

His smelling-bottle ready for the alleys;
He pass'd the Hurdy-gurdies with disdain,
Vowing he'd have them sent on board the galleys:
Just as he made his vow, it 'gan to rain,
Therefore he call'd a coach, and bade it drive amain.

"I'll pull the string," said he, and further said,
"Polluted Jarvey! Ah, thou filthy hack!
Whose strings of life are all dried up and dead,
Whose linsey-wolsey lining hangs all slack,
Whose rug is straw, whose wholeness is a crack;
And evermore thy steps go clatter-clitter;
Whose glass once up can never be got back,
Who prov'st, with jolting arguments and bitter,
That 'tis of vile no-use to travel in a litter.

"Thou inconvenience! thou hungry crop
For all corn! thou snail creeper to and fro,
Who while thou goest ever seem'st to stop,
And fiddle-faddle standest while you go;
I' the morning, freighted with a weight of woe,
Unto some Lazar-house thou journiest,
And in the evening tak'st a double row

Of dowdies, for some dance or party drest, Besides the goods meanwhile thou movest east and west.

"By thy ungallant bearing and sad mien,

An inch appears the utmost thou couldst budge;
Yet at the slightest nod, or hint, or sign,
Round to the curb-stone patient dost thou trudge,
School'd in a beckon, learned in a nudge;
A dull-eyed Argus watching for a fare;
Quiet and plodding, thou dost bear no grudge
To whisking Tilburies or Phaetons rare,
Curricles, or Mail-coaches, swift beyond compare."

Philosophising thus, he pull'd the check,
And bade the coachman wheel to such a street;
Who turning much his body, more his neck,
Louted full low, and hoarsely did him greet.

The tact here is so nice, of the infirmities which are but too likely to beset our poor old friend, that we should only spoil it to say more. To pass then to the merits.

One of the greatest helps to a sense of merit in other things, is a consciousness of one's own wants. Do you despise a hackney-coach? Get tired; get old; get young again. Lay down your carriage, or make it less uneasily too easy. Have to stand up half an hour, out of a storm, under a gateway. Be ill, and wish to visit a friend who is worse. Fall in love,

and want to sit next your mistress. Or if all

this will not do, fall in a cellar.

66

Ben Jonson, in a fit of indignation at the niggardliness of James the First, exclaimed, "He despises me, I suppose, because I live in We think we see a hackney-coach moved out an alley-tell him his soul lives in an alley." of its ordinary patience, and hear it say, “ You there, who sit looking so scornfully at me out of your carriage, are yourself the thing you take me for. Your understanding is a hackneycoach. It is lumbering, rickety, and at a stand. When it moves, it is drawn by things like itself. It is at once the most stationary and the most servile of common-places. And when a good thing is put into it, it does not know it."

that are fastened on their mouths, to get at its shallow feast?

and

But it is difficult to imagine a hackney-coach under so irritable an aspect. Hogarth has drawn a set of hats or wigs with countenances of their own. We have noticed the same thing in the faces of houses; and it sometimes gets in one's way in a landscape-painting, with the outlines of the rocks and trees. A friend tells us, that the hackney-coach has its countenance, with gesticulation besides and now he has pointed it out, we can easily fancy it. Some of them look chucked under the chin, some nodding, some coming at you sideways. We shall never find it easy, however, to fancy the irritable aspect above mentioned. A hackneycoach always appeared to us the most quiescent of moveables. Its horses and it, slumbering on a stand, are an emblem of all the patience in creation, animate and inanimate. The submission with which the coach takes every variety of the weather, dust, rain, and wind, never moving but when some eddying blast makes its old body shiver, is only surpassed by the vital patience of the horses. Can any

thing better illustrate the poet's line about

-Years that bring the philosophic mind,

than the still-hung head, the dim indifferent eye, the dragged and blunt-cornered mouth, and the gaunt imbecility of body dropping its weight on three tired legs in order to give repose to the lame one? When it has blinkers on, they seem to be shutting up its eyes for death, like the windows of a house. Fatigue and the habit of suffering have become as natural to the creature as the bit to its mouth. Once in half an hour it moves the position of its leg, or shakes its drooping ears. The whip makes it go, more from habit than from pain. Its coat has become almost callous to minor stings. The blind and staggering fly in autumn might come to die against its cheek.

Of a pair of hackney-coach horses, one so much resembles the other that it seems unnecessary for them to compare notes. They have that within them, which is beyond the comparative. They no longer bend their heads towards each other, as they go. They stand together as if unconscious of one another's company. But they are not. An old horse misses his companion, like an old man. The presence of an associate, who has gone through pain and suffering with us, need not say anything. It is talk, and memory, and everything. Something of this it may be to our old friends in harness. What are they thinking of, while they stand motionless in the rain? Do they remember? Do they dream? Do they still, unperplexed as their old blood is by too many foods, receive a pleasure from the elements; a dull refreshment from the air and sun Have they yet a palate for the hay which they pull so feebly? or for the rarer grain, which induces them to perform their only voluntary gesture of any vivacity, and toss up the bags

His ears up-prick'd; his braided hanging mane
Upon his compass'd crest now stands on end;
His nostrils drink the air; and forth again,
As from a furnace, vapours doth he send;

His eye, which scornfully glistens like fire,
Shows his hot courage and his high desire,
Sometimes he trots as if he told the steps,
With gentle majesty, and modest pride;
Anon he rears upright, curvets and leaps,
As who would say, lo! thus my strength is tried,
And thus I do to captivate the eye
Of the fair breeder that is standing by.
What recketh he his rider's angry stir,
His flattering holla, or his Stand, I say?
What cares he now for curb, or pricking spur?"
For rich caparisons, or trappings gay?

He sees his love, and nothing else he sees,
For nothing else with his proud sight agrees.
Look, when a painter would surpass the life,
In limning out a well-proportion'd steed,
His art with nature's workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed;

So did this horse excel a common one,
In shape, in courage, colour, pace, and bone.

Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlock shag and long,
Broad breast, full eyes, small head, and nostril wide:"
High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong;
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide;

Look, what a horse should have, he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.

Alas! his only riders now are the rain and a sordid harness! The least utterance of the wretchedest voice makes him stop and become a fixture. His loves were in existence at the time the old sign, fifty miles hence, was painted. His nostrils drink nothing but what they cannot help,-the water out of an old tub. Not all

the hounds in the world could make his ears attain any eminence. His mane is scratchy and lax. The same great poet who wrote the triumphal verses for him and his loves, has written their living epitaph :

:

The poor jades

Lob down their heads, dropping the hide and hips,
The gum down roping from their pale dead eyes;
And in their pale dull mouths the gimmal bit
Lies foul with chew'd grass, still and motionless.

K. Henry 5th, Act 4.

There is a song called the High-mettled Racer, describing the progress of a favourite horse's life, from its time of vigour and glory, down to its furnishing food for the dogs. It is not as good as Shakspeare; but it will do, to those who are half as kind as he. We defy anybody to read that song or be in the habit of singing it or hearing it sung, and treat horses as they are sometimes treated. So much good may an author do, who is in earnest, and does not go in a pedantic way to work. We will not say that Plutarch's good-natured observation about taking care of one's old horse did more for that class of retired servants than all the graver lessons of philosophy. For it is philosophy which first sets people thinking; and then some of them put it in a more popular shape. But we will venture to say, that Plutarch's observation saved many a steed of antiquity a superfluous thump; and in this respect, the author of the High-mettled Racer (Mr. Dibdin we believe, no mean man in his way) may stand by the side of the old illustrious biographer. Next to ancient causes, to the inevitable progress of events, and to the practical part of Christianity (which persons, the most accused of irreligion, have preserved like a glorious infant, through ages of blood and fire) the kindliness of modern philosophy is more immediately owing to the great national writers of Europe, in whose schools we have all been children-to Voltaire in France, and Shakspeare in England. Shakspeare, in his time, obliquely pleaded the cause of the Jew, and got him set on a common level with humanity. The Jew has since been not only allowed to be human, but some have undertaken to show him as the "best good Christian though he knows it not." We shall not dispute the title with him, nor with the other worshippers of Mammon, who force him to the same shrine. We allow, as things go in that quarter, that the Jew is as great a Christian as his neighbour, and his neighbour as great a Jew as he. There is neither love nor money lost between them. But at all events, the Jew is a man ; and with Shakspeare's assistance, the time has arrived, when we can afford to acknowledge the horse for a fellow-creature, and treat him as one. We may say for him, upon the same grounds and to the same purpose, as Shakspeare said for the Israelite, "Hath not a horse organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is ?" Oh-but some are always at hand to cry out,-it would be effeminate to think too much of these things!- Alas! we have no notion of asking the gentlemen to think too much of anything. If they will think at all, it will be a great gain. As to effeminacy (if we must use that ungallant and partial word, for want of a better) it is cruelty [PART 1]

that is effeminate. It is selfishness that is effeminate. Anything is effeminate, which would get an excitement, or save a proper and manly trouble, at the undue expense of another. How does the case stand then between those who ill-treat their horses, and those who spare them?

To return to the coach. Imagine a fine coach and pair, which are standing at the door of a house, in all the pride of their strength and beauty, converted into what they may both become, a hackney, and its old shamblers. Such is one of the meditations of the philosophic eighteenpenny rider. A hackney-coach has often the arms of nobility on it. As we are going to get into it, we catch a glimpse of the faded lustre of an earl's or marquis's coronet, and think how many light or proud hearts have ascended those now ricketty steps. In this coach perhaps an elderly lady once rode to her wedding, a blooming and blushing girl. Her mother and sister were on each side of her; the bridegroom opposite in a blossomcoloured coat. They talk of everything in the world of which they are not thinking. The sister was never prouder of her. The mother with difficulty represses her own pride and tears. The bride, thinking he is looking at her, casts down her eyes, pensive in her joy. The bridegroom is at once the proudest, and the humblest, and the happiest man in the world-For our parts, we sit in a corner, and are in love with the sister. We dream she is going to speak to us in answer to some indifferent question, when a hoarse voice comes in at the front window, and says "Whereabouts Sir !"

And grief has consecrated thee, thou reverend dilapidation, as well as joy! Thou hast carried unwilling, as well as willing hearts; hearts, that have thought the slowest of thy paces too fast; faces that have sat back in a corner of thee, to hide their tears from the very thought of being seen. In thee the destitute have been taken to the poor-house, and the wounded and sick to the hospital; and many an arm has been round many an insensible waist. Into thee the friend or the lover has hurried, in a passion of tears, to lament his loss. In thee he has hastened to condole the dying or the wretched. In thee the father, or mother, or the older kinswoman, more patient in her years, has taken the little child to the grave, the human jewel that must be parted with.

But joy appears in thee again, like the look-in of the sun-shine. If the lover has gone in thee unwillingly, he has also gone willingly. How many friends hast thou not carried to merrymeetings! How many young parties to the play! How many children, whose faces thou hast turned in an instant from the extremity of lachrymose weariness to that of staring delight. Thou hast contained as many different passions in thee as a human heart; and for the

с

sake of the human heart, old body, thou art venerable. Thou shalt be as respectable as a reduced old gentleman, whose very slovenliness is pathetic. Thou shalt be made gay, as he is over a younger and richer table, and thou shalt be still more touching for the gaiety.

We wish the hackney-coachman were as interesting a machine as either his coach or horses; but it must be owned, that of all the driving species he is the least agreeable specimen. This is partly to be attributed to the life which has most probably put him into his situation; partly to his want of outside passengers to cultivate his gentility; and partly to the disputable nature of his fare, which always leads him to be lying and cheating. The waterman of the stand, who beats him in sordidness of appearance, is more respectable. He is less of a vagabond, and cannot cheat you. Nor is the hackney-coachman only disagreeable in himself, but, like Falstaff reversed, the cause of disagreeableness in others; for he sets people upon disputing with him in pettiness and ill-temper. He induces the mercenary to be violent, and the violent to seem mercenary. A man whom you took for a pleasant laughing fellow, shall all of a sudden put on an irritable look of calculation, and vow that he will be charged with a constable, rather than pay the sixpence. Even fair woman shall waive her all-conquering softness, and sound a shrill trumpet in reprobation of the extortionate charioteer, whom, if she were a man, she says, she would expose. Being a woman, then, let her not expose herself. Oh, but it is intolerable to be so imposed upon ! Let the lady, then, get a pocket book, if she must, with the hackney-coach fares in it; or a pain in the legs, rather than the temper; or, above all, let her get wiser, and have an understanding that can dispense with the good opinion of the hackneycoachman. Does she think that her rosy lips were made to grow pale about two-and-sixpence; or that the expression of them will ever be like her cousin Fanny's, if she goes on ?

The stage-coachman likes the boys on the road, because he knows they admire him. The hackney-coachman knows that they cannot admire him, and that they can get up behind his coach, which makes him very savage. The cry of "Cut behind!" from the malicious urchins on the pavement, wounds at once his self-love and his interest. He would not mind overloading his master's horses for another sixpence, but to do it for nothing is what shocks his humanity. He hates the boy for imposing upon him, and the boys for reminding him that he has been imposed upon; and he would willingly twinge the cheeks of all nine. The cut of his whip over the coach is malignant. He has a constant eye to the road behind him. He has also an eye to what may be left in the coach. He will undertake to search the straw

for you, and miss the half-crown on purpose. He speculates on what he may get above his fare, according to your manners or company; and knows how much to ask for driving faster or slower than usual. He does not like wet weather so much as people suppose; for he says it rots both his horses and harness, and he takes parties out of town when the weather is fine, which produces good payments in a lump. Lovers, late supper-eaters, and girls going home from boarding-school, are his best pay. He has a rascally air of remonstrance when you dispute half the over-charge, and according to the temper he is in, begs you to consider his bread, hopes you will not make such a fuss about a trifle; or tells you, you may take his number or sit in the coach all night.

A great number of ridiculous adventures must have taken place, in which hackneycoaches were concerned. The story of the celebrated harlequin Lunn, who secretly pitched himself out of one into a tavern window, and when the coachman was about to submit to the loss of his fare, astonished him by calling out again from the inside, is too well known for repetition. There is one of Swift, not perhaps so common. He was going, one dark evening, to dine with some great man, and was accompanied by some other clergymen, to whom he gave their cue. They were all in their canonicals. When they arrive at the house, the coachman opens the door, and lets down the steps. Down steps the Dean, very reverend in his black robes; after him comes another personage, equally black and dignified; then another; then a fourth. The coachman, who recollects taking up no greater number, is about to put up the steps, when another clergyman descends. After giving way to this other, he proceeds with great confidence to toss them up, when lo! another comes. Well, there cannot, he thinks, be more than six. He is mistaken. Down comes a seventh, then an eighth; then a ninth; all with decent intervals; the coach, in the mean time, rocking as if it were giving birth to so many dæmons. The coachman can conclude no less. He cries out, "The devil! the devil!" and is preparing to run away, when they all burst into laughter. They had gone round as they descended, and got in at the other door.

We remember in our boyhood an edifying comment on the proverb of "all is not gold that glistens." The spectacle made such an impression upon us, that we recollect the very spot, which was at the corner of a road in the way from Westminster to Kennington, near a stonemason's. It was a severe winter, and we were out on a holiday, thinking, perhaps, of the gallant hardships to which the ancient soldiers accustomed themselves, when we suddenly be held a group of hackney-coachmen, not, as Spenser says of his witch,

Busy, as seemed, about some wicked gin,

but pledging each other in what appeared to us to be little glasses of cold water. What temperance, thought we! What extraordinary and noble content! What more than Roman simplicity! Here are a set of poor Englishmen, of the homeliest order, in the very depth of winter, quenching their patient and honourable thirst with modicums of cold water! O true virtue and courage! O sight worthy of the Timoleons and Epaminondases! We know not how long we remained in this error; but the first time we recognised the white devil for what it was the first time we saw through the crystal purity of its appearance-was a great blow to us. We did not then know what the drinkers went through; and this reminds us that we have omitted one great redemption of the hackney-coachman's character-his being at the mercy of all chances and weathers. Other drivers have their settled hours and pay. He only is at the mercy of every call and every casualty; he only is dragged, without notice, like the damned in Milton, into the extremities of wet and cold, from his alehouse fire to the freezing rain; he only must go any where, at what hour and to whatever place you choose, his old rheumatic limbs shaking under his weight of rags, and the snow and sleet beating into his puckered face, through streets which the wind scours like a channel.

L.-REMARKS UPON ANDREA DE BASSO'S ODE TO A DEAD BODY*.

WE are given to understand by the Italian critics, that this poem made a great sensation, and was alone thought sufficient to render its author of celebrity. Its loathly heroine had been a beauty of Ferrara, proud and luxurious. It is written in a fierce Catholic spirit, and is incontestably very striking and even appalling. Images, which would only be disgusting on other occasions, affect us beyond disgust, by the strength of such earnestness and sincerity. Andrea de Basso lays bare the mortifying conclusions of the grave, and makes the pride of beauty bow down to them. The picture of the once beautiful, proud, and unthinking creature, caught and fixed down in a wasting trap,-the calling upon her to come forth, and see if any will now be won into her arms,-the taunts about the immortal balm which she thought she had in her veins, the whole, in short, of the terrible disadvantage under which she is made to listen with unearthly ears to the poet's lecture, affects the imagnation to shuddering.

No wonder that such an address made a sensation, even upon the gaiety of a southern city.

• The reader will gather the substance of it from what follows. The ode is to be found in the sixth volume of the Parnaso Italiano. A translation has appeared in the volume of the author's Poetical Works, just published.

One may conceive how it fixed the superstitious more closely over their meditations and skulls; how it sent the young, and pious, and humble, upon their knees; how it baulked the vivacity of the serenaders; brought tears into the eyes of affectionate lovers; and shot doubt and confusion even into the cheeks of the merely wanton. Andrea de Basso, armed with the lightnings of his church, tore the covering from the grave, and smote up the heart of Ferrara as with an earthquake.

For a lasting impression, however, or for such a one as he would have desired, the author, with all his powers, overshot his mark. Men build again over earthquakes, as nature resumes her serenity. The Ferrarese returned to their loves and guitars, when absolution had set them to rights. It was impossible that Andrea de Basso should have succeeded in fixing such impressions upon the mind; and it would have been an error in logic, as well as everything else, if he had. He committed himself, both as a theologian and a philosopher. There is an allusion, towards the end of his ode, to the Catholic notion, that the death of a saintly person is accompanied by what they call "the odour of sanctity;"- -a literalised metaphor, which they must often have been perplexed to maintain. But the assents of superstition, and the instinct of common sense, keep a certain separation at bottom; and the poet drew such a picture of mortality, as would unavoidably be applied to every one, vicious or virtuous. It was too close and mortifying, even for the egotism of religious fancy to overcome. All would have an interest in contradicting it somehow or other.

On the other hand, if they could not well contradict or bear to think of it, his mark was overshot there. It has been observed, in times of shipwrecks, plagues, and other circumstances of a common despair, that upon the usual principle of extremes meeting, mankind turn upon Death their pursuer, and defy him to the teeth. The superstitious in vain exhort them to think, and threaten them with the consequences of refusal. They have threats enough. If they could think to any purpose of refreshment, they would. But time presses; the exhortation is too like the evil it would remedy; and they endeavour to crowd into a few moments all the enjoyments to which nature has given them a tendency, and to which, with a natural piety beyond that of their threateners, they feel that they have both a tendency and a right. If many such odes as Basso's could have been written,if the court of Ferrara had turned superstitious and patronised such productions, the next age would not merely have been lively; it would have been debauched.

Again, the reasoning of such appeals to the general sense is absurd in itself. They call upon us to join life and death together;-to think of what we are not, with the feelings of