66

it. A glimpse of a reverence is retained for sprightliness of mind and shapeliness of person; and thus the case is not rendered hopeless, should circumstances arise that tempt the patient into a more active system. A fair kinswoman of ours, once reckoned among the fairest of her native city, a very intelligent woman as far as books went, and latterly a very sharp observer into the faults of other people, by dint of a certain exasperation of her own,literally fell a sacrifice to sitting in-doors, and never quitting her favourite pastime of reading. The pastime was at once her bane and her antidote. It would have been nothing but a blessing had she varied it. But her misfortune was, that her self-will was still greater than her sense, and that being able to fill up her moments as pleasantly as she wished during health, she had persuaded herself that she could go on filling them up as pleasantly by the same process, when she grew older; and this "wouldn't do!" For our bodies are changing, while our minds are thinking nothing of the matter; and people in vain attribute the new pains and weaknesses which come upon them to this and that petty cause, a cold, or a heat, or an apple; thinking they shall be better to-morrow," and as healthy as they were before. Time will not palter with the real state of the case, for all our self-will and our over-weening confidence. The person we speak of literally rusted in her chair; lost the use of her limbs, and died paralytic and ghastly to look upon, of premature old age. The physicians said it was a clear case. On the other hand, we heard some years ago of a gentleman of seventy, a medical man, (now most probably alive and merry-we hope he will read this,) who, meeting a kinsman of ours in the street, and being congratulated on the singular youthfulness of his aspect, said that he was never better or more active in his life; that it was all owing to his having walked sixteen miles a day, on an average, for the greater part of it; and that at the age of seventy, he felt all the lightness and cheerfulness of seventeen ! This is an extreme case, owing to peculiar circumstances; but it shows of what our nature is capable, where favourable circumstances are not contradicted. This gentleman had cultivated a cheerful benevolence of mind, as well as activity of body, and the two together were irresistible, even to old Time. The death of such a man must be like going to sleep after a good journey.

The instinct which sets people in exercise is one of the most natural of all instincts, and where it is totally stopped, must have been hurt by some very injudicious circumstances in the bringing up, either of pampered will or prevented activity. The restlessness felt by nervous people is Nature's kindly intimation that they should bestir themselves. Motion, as far as hitherto has been known, is the first

law of the universe. The air, the rivers, the world move; the very "fixed stars," as we call them, are moving towards some unknown point; the substance, apparently the most unmoving, the table in your room, or the wall of the opposite house, is gaining or losing particles: if you had eyes fine enough, you would see its surface stirring: some philosophers even hold that every substance is made up of vital atoms. As to oneself, one must either move away from death and disease, and so keep pleasantly putting them off, or they will move us with a vengeance, ay, in the midst of our most sedentary forgetfulness, or while we flatter ourselves we are as still and as sound as marble. Time is all the while drawing lines in our faces, clogging our limbs, putting ditch-water into our blood;-preparing us to mingle with the grave and the rolling earth, since we will not obey the great law, and move of our own accord.

Come, dear readers, now is the season for such of you as are virtuous in this matter to pride and rejoice yourselves; and for such of you as have omitted the virtue in your list, to put it there. It will grace and gladden all the rest. A cricketer is a sort of glorifier of exercise, and we respect him accordingly but it is not in every one's power to be a cricketer ; and respect attends a man in proportion as he does what he is able. Come then, be respectable in this matter as far as you can ;—have a whole mile's respectability, if possible,-or two miles, or four : let our homage wait upon you into the fields, thinking of all the good you are doing to yourselves, to your kindred, to your offspring, born or not born, and to all friends who love you, and would be grieved to lose you. Healthy and graceful example makes healthy and graceful children, makes cheerful tempers, makes grateful and loving friends. We know but of one inconvenience resulting from the sight of such virtue; and that is, that it sometimes makes one love it too much, and long to know it, and show our gratitude. A poet has said, that he never could travel through different places and think how many agreeable people they probably contained, without feeling a sort of impatience at not being able to make their acquaintance. But he was a rich poet, and his benevolence was a little pampered and selfwilled. It is enough for us that we sometimes resent our inability to know those whom we behold,-who charm us visibly, or of whose existence, somehow or other, we are made pleasantly certain, without going so far as to raise up exquisite causes of distress after his fashion. Now, as we never behold the cricketer, or the horseman, or the field-stroller (provided we can suppose him bound on his task with a liking of it) without a feeling of something like respect and gratitude (for the twofold pleasurable idea he gives us of nature and himself), so we cannot look upon all those fair

creatures, blooming or otherwise, who walk abroad with their friends or children, whether in village or town, fine square or common street, without feeling something like a bit of love, and wishing that the world were in such condition as to let people evince what they feel, and be more like good, honest folks, and chatty companions. If we sometimes admire maid-servants instead of their mistresses, it is❘ not our fault, but that of the latter, who will not come abroad. Besides, a real good-humoured maid-servant, with a pretty face, playing over the sward of a green square with her mistress's children, is a very respectable, as well as pleasant object. May no inferior of the other sex, under pretence of being a gentleman, deceive her, and render her less so.

XV.-A DUSTY DAY.

AMONG the "Miseries of Human Life," as a wit pleasantly entitled them, there are few, while the rascal is about it, worse than a Great Cloud of Dust, coming upon you in street or road, you having no means of escape, and the carriages, or flock of sheep, evidently being bent on imparting to you a full share of their besetting horror. The road is too narrow to leave you a choice, even if it had two pathways, which it has not :-the day is hot; the wind is whisking; you have come out in stockings instead of boots, not being aware that you were occasionally to have two feet depth of dust to walk in :—now, now the dust is on you, you are enveloped, you are blind; you have to hold your hat on against the wind: the carriages grind by, or the sheep go pattering along, baaing through all the notes of their poor gamut; perhaps carriages and sheep are together, the latter eschewing the horses' legs, and the shepherd's dog driving against your own, and careering over the woolly backs :-Whew! what a dusting! What a blinding! What a whirl! The noise decreases; you stop; you look about you; gathering up your hat, coat, and faculties, after apologising to the gentleman against whom you have "lumped," and who does not look a bit the happier for your apology. The dust is in your eyes, in your hair, in your shoes and stockings, in your neck-cloth, in your mouth. You grind your teeth in dismay, and find them gritty.

Perhaps another carriage is coming; and you, finding yourself in the middle of the road, and being resolved to be master of, at least, this inferior horror, turn about towards the wall or paling, and propose to make your way accordingly, and have the dust behind your back instead of in front; when lo! you begin sneezing, and cannot see. You have taken involuntary snuff.

Or you suddenly discern a street, down which you can turn, which you do with rap

The reader knows what sort of a day we speak of. It is all dusty ;-the windows are dusty; the people are dusty; the hedges in the roads are horribly dusty,--pitiably,-you think they must feel it; shoes and boots are like a baker's men on horseback eat and drink dust; coachmen sit screwing up their eyes; the gardener finds his spade slip into the ground, fetching up smooth portions of earth, all made of dust. What is the poor pedestrian to do?

To think of something superior to the dust,whether grave or gay. This is the secret of being master of any ordinary, and of much extraordinary trouble :-bring a better idea upon it, and it is hard if the greater thought does not do something against the less. When we meet with any very unpleasant person, to whose ways we cannot suddenly reconcile ourselves, we think of some delightful friend, perhaps two hundred miles off,-in Northumberland, or in Wales. When dust threatens to blind us, we shut our eyes to the disaster, and contrive to philosophise a bit even then.

"Oh, but it is not worth while doing that."

Good. If so, there is nothing to do but to be as jovial as the dust itself, and take all gaily. Indeed, this is the philosophy we speak of.

"And yet the dust is annoying too."

Well-take then just as much good sense as you require for the occasion. Think of a jest ; think of a bit of verse; think of the dog you saw just now, coming out of the pond, and frightening the dandy in his new trousers. But at all events don't let your temper be mastered by such a thing as a cloud of dust. It will show, either that you have a very infirm temper indeed, or no ideas in your head.

On all occasions in life, great or small, you may be the worse for them, or the better. You may be made the weaker or the stronger by them; ay, even by so small a thing as a little dust.

When the famous Arbuthnot was getting into his carriage one day, he was beset with dust. What did he do? Damn the dust or the coachman? No; that was not his fashion. He was a wit, and a good-natured man; so he fell to making an epigram, which he sent to his friends. It was founded on scientific knowledge, and consisted of the following pleasant exaggeration :

ON A DUSTY DAY.

The dust in smaller particles arose,
Than those which fluid bodies do compose.
Contraries in extremes do often meet;
It was so dry, that you might call it wet.

the rest of his hair like a badger's. You then for the first time see a little water by the wayside, thick and white with chalk; and are doubting whether to admire it as a liquid or detest it for its colour, when a quantity of lime is dashed against the sieve, and you receive in your eyes and mouth a taste of the dry and burning elements of mortar, without the refreshment of the wet. Finally, your shoe is burned; and as the bricklayer says something to his fellow in Irish, who laughs, you fancy that he is witty at your expense, and has made some ingenious bull.

"A pretty picture, Mr. Seer! and very refreshing, this hot weather!"

Oh, but you are only a chance-acquaintance of us, my dear Sir; you don't know what philosophies we writers and readers of "The Seer" possess, which render us "lords of ourselves," unencumbered even with the mighty misery of a hot day, and the hod on another man's shoulder. You, unfortunate easy man, have been thinking of nothing but the "aggravations" of the street all this while, and are ready to enter your house after the walk, in a temper to kick off your shoes into the servant's face. We, besides being in the street, have been in all sorts of pleasant and remote places; have been at Babylon; have been at Bagdad; have bathed in the river Tigris, the river of that city of the "Arabian Nights ;" nay, have been in Paradise itself! led by old Bochart and his undeniable maps, where you see the place as "graphically set forth" as though it had never vanished, and Adam and Eve walking in it, taller than the trees. We are writing upon the very book this moment instead of a desk, a fond custom of ours; though, for dignity's sake, we beg to say we have a desk; but we like an old folio to write upon, written by some happy believing hand, no matter whether we go all lengths or not with his sort of proof, provided he be in earnest and a good fellow*.

Let us indulge ourselves a moment, during this hot subject, with the map in question. It is now before us, the river Euphrates running up through it in dark fulness, and appearing through the paper on which we are writing like rich veins. Occasionally we take up the paper to see it better; the garden of Eden, however, always remaining visible below, and the mountains of Armenia at top. The map is a small folio size, darkly printed, with thick letters; a good stout sprinkle of mountains; a great tower to mark the site of Babylon; trees, as formal as a park in those days, to shadow forth the terrestrial paradise, with Adam and Eve, as before mentioned; Greek and Hebrew names here and there mingled with the Latin; a lion, towards the north-west, sitting in Armenia, and

* Our volume is the Geographia Sacra, followed by his commentary on Stephen of Byzantium, the treatise De Jure Regum, &c. &c. The Leyden Edition, 1707.

bigger than a mountain; some other beast, stepping west" from the Caspian sea; and a great tablet in the south-west corner, presenting the title of the map, the site of Eden, or the Terrestrial Paradise (Edenis, seu Paradisi Terrestris Situs), surmounted with a tree, and formidable with the Serpent; who, suddenly appearing from one side of it with the apple in his mouth, is startling a traveller on the other. These old maps are as good to study as pictures and books: and the region before us is specially rich-reverend with memories of scripture, pompous with Alexander's cities, and delightful with the "Arabian Nights." You go up from the Persian Gulf at the foot, passing (like Sindbad) the city of Caiphat, where "bdellium" is to be had, and the island of Bahrim, famous for its pearl fishery (Bahrim Insula Margaritarum Piscat. celebris); then penetrate the garden of Eden, with the river Euphrates, as straight as a canal; pass the Cypress-grove, which furnished the wood of which the ark was made; Mousal, one of our old friends in the "Arabian Nights;" Babylon, famous for a hundred fanes, the sublime of brick-building; 8772 the “Naarda of Ptolemy," a "celebrated school of the Jews;" Ur (of the Chaldees), the country of Abraham; Noah's city, Xwun apavov, the city of Eight, so called from the eight persons that came out of the ark; Omar's Island, where there is a mosque (says the map) made out of the relics of the ark; Mount Ararat, on the top of which it rested; and thence you pass the springs of the Tigris and the Euphrates into Colchis with its Golden Fleece, leaving the Caspian sea on one side, and the Euxine on the other, with Phasis the country of pheasants, and Cappadocia, where you see the mild light shining on the early Christian church; and you have come all this way through the famous names of Persia, and Arabia, and Armenia, and Mesopotamia, and Syria, and Assyria, with Arbela on the right hand, where Darius was overthrown, and Damascus on the left, rich, from time immemorial to this day, with almost every Eastern association of ideas, sacred and profane.

In regions of this nature, did sincere, bookloving, scholarly Bochart spend the days of his mind,-by far the greater portion of the actual days of such a man's life; and for that reason we, who, though not so scholarly, love books as well as he did, love to have the folio of such a man under our paper for a desk,-making his venerable mixture of truth and fiction a foundation, as it were, for our own love of both, and rendering the dream of his existence, in some measure, as tangible to us as it was to himself, in the shape of one of his works of love.-Do people now-a-days,-do even we ourselves,-love books as they did in those times? It is hardly possible, seeing how the volumes have multiplied to distract choice and

passion, and also how small in size they have become,-octavos and duodecimos. A little book is indeed "a love," (to use a modern phrase,)—and fitted to carry about with us in our walks and pockets: but then a great book, -a folio, was a thing to look up to,-to build, -a new and lawful Babel,-and therefore it had an aspect more like a religion.-Well; love is religion too, and of the best; and so we will return to our common task.

Now observe, O casual reader of "The Seer," what such of us as are habituated to it found in our half-built street. You take a brick perhaps for an ordinary bit of burnt clay, fit only to build No. 9, Golf-street, Little Meadows; and to become a brick-bat, and be kicked to pieces in an old alley. O thou of little bookstall! Why, the very manufacture is illustrious with antiquity-with the morning beams that touched the house-tops of Shinaar;-there is a clatter of brick-making in the fields of Accad; and the work looks almost as ancient to this day, with its straw-built tents and its earthy landscape. Not desolate therefore, or unrefreshed, were we in our new and hot street; for the first brick, like a talisman, transported us into old Babylon, with its tower and its gardens; and there we drove our chariot on the walls, and conversed with Herodotus, and got out of the way of Semiramis, and read, as men try to read at this day, the arrow-headed letters on the bricks, as easy to us at that time as A. B. C.; though what they mean now, neither we nor Mr. Rich can tell. The said brick, as our readers have seen, thence took us into paradise, and so through all the regions of Mesopotamia and the Arabian Nights, with our friends Bochart and Bedreddin Hassan; and returning home, what do we descry? The street itself alone! No: Ben Jonson, the most illustrious of bricklayers, handling his trowel on the walls of Chancery-lane, and the obstinate remnants of Roman brick and mortar lurking still about London, and Spenser's celebration of—

"Those bricky towers,

The which on Themmes brode aged backe doe ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowres;

to wit, the Temple; and then we think of our old and picture-learned friend, our lamented Hazlitt, who first taught us not to think white cottages better than red, especially among trees, noting to us the finer harmony of the contrast -to which we can bear instant and curious testimony; for passing the other day through the gate that leads from St. James's Park into the old court, betwixt Sutherland and Marlborough Houses, we marvelled at what seemed to our near-sighted eyes a shower of red colours in a tree to the right of us, at the corner; which colours, upon inspection, proved to be nothing better than those of the very red bricks, that bordered the windows of the building behind the trees. We smiled at the mistake; but it

was with pleasure; for it reminded us that even defects of vision may have their compensations; and it looked like a symbol of the pleasures with which fancy, and common-place, may conspire to enrich an observer willing to be pleased.

The most elegant houses in the world, generally speaking, are built of clay. You have riches inside,-costliness and beauty on the internal walls,-paintings, papers, fine draperies, themselves compounded of the homeliest growths of the earth; but pierce an inch or two outwards, and you come to the stuff of which the hovel is made. It is nothing but mind at last which throws elegance upon the richest as well as the poorest materials. Let a rich man give a hundred guineas for a daub, and people laugh at him and his daub together. The inside of his wall is no better than his out. But let him put Titian or Correggio upon it, and he puts mind there,-visible mind, and therefore the most precious to all; his own mind too, as well as the painter's, for love partakes of what it loves; and yet the painter's visible mind is not a bit different, except in degree, from the mind with which every lover of the graceful and the possible may adorn whatsoever it looks upon. The object will be perhaps rich in itself, but if not, it will be rich, somehow or other, in association! and it cannot be too often repeated, as a truth in strictest logic, that every impression is real which is actually made upon us, whether by fact or fancy. No minds entirely divorce the two, or can divorce them, even if they evince the spiritual part of their faculties in doing nothing better than taking a fancy to a tea-cup or a hat; and Nature, we may be assured, intended that we should receive pleasure from the associations of ideas, as well as from images tangible; for all mankind, more or less, do so. The great art is to cultivate impressions of the pleasant sort, just as a man will raise wholesome plants in his garden, and not poisonous ones.

A bricklayer's tools may illustrate a passage in Shakspeare. One of them is called a bevel, and is used to cut the under-side of bricks to a required angle. "Bevel" is a sort of irregular square.

"They that level

At my abuses, reckon up their own.

I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel." Sonnet CXXI.

We shall conclude this paper with two bricklaying anecdotes, one of which has more manner than matter; but there is an ease in it, very comforting, when we reflect upon the laboriousness of the occupation in a hot day. And this reminds us, that in considering the bricklayer, we must not forget how many of his hours he passes in a world of his own, though in the streets,-pacing on scaffolding, descending and ascending ladders, living on the outsides of houses, betwixt ground-floors and garrets, or