life which these eyes have subsequently beheld, can all the wit I have heard or read in later times, compare with your fashion, with your brilliancy, with your delightful grace, and sparkling vivacious rattle? Who knows? They may have kept those very books at the library still, -- at the well-remembered library on the Pantiles, where they sell that delightful, useful Tunbridge ware. I will go and see. I went my way to the Pantiles, the queer little old-world Pantiles, where a hundred years since so much good company came to take its pleasure. Is it possible, that in the past century, gentlefolks of the first rank (as I read lately in a Lecture on George II. in this Magazine) assembled here and entertained each other with gaming, dancing, fiddling, and tea? There are fiddlers, harpers, and trumpeters performing at this moment in a weak little old balcony, but where is the fine company ? Where are the earls, duchesses, bishops, and magnificent embroidered gamesters? A half-dozen of children and their nurses are listening to the musicians; an old lady or two in a poke bonnet passes, and for the rest, I see but an uninteresting population of native tradesmen. As for the library, its window is full of pictures of burly theologians, and their works, sermons, apologues, and so forth. Can I go in and ask the young ladies at the counter for Manfroni, or the One-Handed Monk, and Life in London, or the Adventures of Corinthian Tom, Jeremiah Hawthorn, Esq., and their friend Bob Logic? absurd. I turn away abashed from the casement, - from the Pantiles, no longer Pantiles, but Parade. I stroll over the Common and survey the beautiful purple hills around, twinkling with a thousand bright villas, which have sprung up over this charming ground since first I saw it. What an admirable scene of peace and plenty! What a delicious air breathes over the heath, blows the cloud shadows across it, and murmurs through the full-clad trees! Can the world show a land fairer, richer, more cheerful? I see a portion of it when I look up from the window at which I write. But fair scene, green woods, bright terraces gleaming in sunshine, and purple clouds swollen with summer rain nay, the very pages over which my head bends disappear from before my eyes. They are looking backwards, back into forty years off, into a dark room, into a little house hard by on the Common here, in the Bartlemy-tide holidays. The parents have gone to town for two days: the house is all his own, his own and a grim old maid-servant's, and a little boy is seated at night in the lonely drawing-room,— poring over Manfroni, or the One-Handed Monk, so frightened that he scarcely dares to turn round. TO THE MOON. BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. Q UEEN of the stars!-so gentle, so benign, When darkness creeping o'er thy silver brow In days when Fancy wrought unchecked by fear, O still beloved (for thine, meek Power, are charms That fascinate the very Babe in arms, While he, uplifted towards thee, laughs outright, Spreading his little palms in his glad Mother's sight) O still beloved, once worshipped! Time, that frowns In his destructive flight on earthly crowns, Spares thy mild splendor; still those far-shot beams Tremble on dancing waves and rippling streams With stainless touch, as chaste as when thy praise And through dark trials still dost thou explore And painful struggle and deliverance — prayed Then, silent Monitress! let us not blind Learn from thy course, where'er their own be taken, CHARACTER OF WATT. BY LORD JEFFREY. IND NDEPENDENTLY of his great attainments in meclianics, Mr. Watt was an extraordinary, and in many respects a wonderful man. Perhaps no individual in his age possessed so much and such varied and exact information, had read so much, or remembered what he had read so accurately and well. He had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodizing power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. It seemed as if every subject that was casually started in con versation with him had been that which he had been last occupied in studying and exhausting, such was the copiousness, the precision, and the admirable clearness of the information which he poured out upon it without effort or hesitation. Nor was this promptitude and compass of knowledge confined in any degree to the studies connected with his ordinary pursuits. That he should have been minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of physical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, - |