INABILITY TO DIE. Three drunken rioters go out to kill Death, who meets them in the likeness of a decrepit old man, and directs them to a treasure which brings them to their destruction. The old man only is given here. When they had gone not fully half a mile, This oldé man 'gan look in his viságe, ?" That wouldé change his youthé for mine age; As longé time as it is Goddés will. Ne Death, alas! ne will not have my life: And on the ground, which is my mother's gate, I knocké with my staff early and late, Alas! when shall my bonés be at rest? (That is, for a coffin and a winding-sheet of hair-cloth.) DESCRIPTION OF THE COCK. (In the story of the" Cock and the Fox.") His comb was redder than the fine corál, Embatteled as it were a castle wall; His bill was black, and as the jet it shone, Like azure were his leggés and his tone; (His toes) His nailés whiter than the lily flower, And like the burned gold was his colour, Compare the above verses (taking care of the accent) with the most popular harmonies of Pope, and see into what a flowing union of strength and sweetness the "old poet" could get, when he chose. He flew down from his beam, (He had been frightened by a fox.) And on his toes he roameth up and down, ; books were rare,-the key to almost all the quaintnesses of Chaucer. The rest of them are connected with his adherence to the originals from which he translated, and only appear strange from difference of time or national customs. A want of consideration to this effect led Mr. Hazlitt into an error, when he instanced that pleasant, scornful admonition to the sun in Troilus and Creseida, (to go and sell his light to them that "engrave small seals,") as an evidence of Chaucer's minuteness and particularity. The original of Troilus and Creseida was by an Italian; and in Italy the seal-engravers of those times were famous, and in great employ; nor was anything more natural for a lover, angry with the day-time, than to tell the sun to go and give his light to those that so notoriously needed it. Among those other folk was Creseida (Matchless) Her goodly looking gladded all the press; [What a pity this fine line did not terminate with a full stop! but he goes on-] As was Creseid,' they saiden evereach one, (In small space) And nigh the door, aye under shamés drede, (that is, not shame-faced, but apprehensive of being put to shame,-put out of her selfpossession) Simple of attire and debonnair of cheer; Troilus thus seeing her for the first time, looks hard at her, like a town-gallant; and she, being town-bred herself, for all her unaffectedness, thinks it necessary to let him understand that he is not to stare at her. She n'as not with the most of her statúre, (her stature was not of the tallest) (her manner was so correspondent with her meaning) -that men might in her guess Honour, estate, and womanly nobless. Then Troilus, right wonder well withal, 'Gan for to like her meaning and her cheer, Which somedeal deignous was, (was a little haughty) I saw her dance so comely, Carol and sing so sweetly, And laugh and play so womanly, And looken so debonairly, So goodly speak and so friendly, N'as seen so blissful a treasure. Ne neither yellow, nor brown it n'as ; (sad is in earnest) Simplé, of good muchel, not too wide; In all her face a wicked sign, The Book of the Duchess. And there is a great deal more of the description. GOING TO SLEEP IN HEARING OF A NIGHTINGALE. A nightingale upon a cedar green, Troilus and Creseida. EXQUISITE COMPARISON OF A NIGHTINGALE, WITH CONFIDENCE AFTER FEAR. And as the new abashed nightingale, That stinteth first when she beginneth sing, When that she heareth any herdés tale, (herdsman counting his flock) Or in the hedges any wight stirring; And after, siker DOTH HER VOICE OUTRING; (Siker is securely) Right so Crescidé, when that her aread stent, We conclude this long article very unwillingly (having to omit a hundred beautiful passages,) with a specimen of Chaucer's philosophy, particularly fit to honour these pages: For thilké ground that beareth the weedés wick (wicked or poisonous) Bear'th eke these wholesome herbés as full oft; The rose ywaxeth sote, and smooth, and soft; And next the darké night is the glad morrow, XXXI.-PETER WILKINS AND THE FLYING WOMEN. book written about a hundred years back, purporting to be the work of a shipwrecked voyager, and relating the discovery of a people who had wings. It is mentioned somewhere, with great esteem, by Mr. Southey, if our memory does not deceive us; and has been altogether so much admired, and so popular, that we are surprised Mr. Dunlop has omitted it in his "History of Fiction." The name, "Peter Wilkins," has, to the present perplexed and aspiring generation (not yet knowing what to retain and what to get rid of) a poor and vulgar sound. It is not Montreville, or Mordaunt, or Montgomery. "Peter" is not the name for a card. "Wilkins" hardly THE "Adventures of Peter Wilkins" is a announces himself as a diner with dukes. But a hundred years ago people did not conceive that a gentleman's pretensions were nominal. What novelist now-a-days would call his hero "Tom Jones?" Yet thus was his great work christened by Fielding, a man of noble family. However, there is a "preferment" in the instinct of this aspiration. Society has had a lift, and is inclined to take everything for an advantage and an elegance, which it sees in possession of its new company. By-and-by, it will be content with the real elegances, and drop the pretended. It is a great honour to a writer to invent a being at once new and delightful; and the honour is not the less, for the apparent obviousness of the invention. Let any one try to make a new combination of this sort, and he will find how difficult it is. We will venture to say, that besides genius in the ordinary sense of the word, there is a faith in it, and a remoteness from things worldly, that implies a virtue and a child-like simplicity, not common but to minds of the higher order. Some writers would think they were going to be merely childish; and would very properly desist. Others would be apprehensive of ridicule; and would desist with like reason. that everybody would succeed, who fancied he should. Taste and judgment are requisite to all good inventions, as well as an imagination to find them; and there must be, above all, a strong taste for the truth; verisimilitude, or the likeness of truth, being the great charm in the wildest of fictions. It is very difficult to unite the imaginative with the worldly; and men of real genius sometimes make mistakes, in consequence, fit only for the most literal or incoherent understandings. Not We have headed our article "Flying Women," instead of the Flying People, because, though the beings discovered by our friend Peter are of both sexes, we could never quite persuade ourselves that his males had an equal right to their graundee. All however, that he says about the Flying Nation as a people is ingenious. He has escaped, in particular, in a most happy manner, from the difficulty of introducing his plain-backed hero among them without lessening his dignity, by means of implicating him with a prophecy important to their wellbeing; and his speculations upon their religion and policy, show him to have been a man of an original turn of reflection in everything; good-hearted, and zealous for the advancement of mankind. But his lords, his architects, and his miners, violate the remoteness of his invention, and bring it back to common-place; nor was this necessary to render his work useful. The utility of a work of imagination consists in softening and elevating the mind generally; and this is the effect of his Flying Woman. All that relates to her is luckily set in a frame by itself; is remote, quiet, and superior. She is as much above Peter's race in sincerity, as in her wings; and yet there is nothing about her, which, in a higher state of humanity, the author does not succeed in making us suppose possible. Peter is even raised towards her by dint of his admiration of her truth; and the sweetness of her disposition more than meets him half-way, and sets them both on a level. The author of this curious invention must have been a very modest as well as clever man, or have had some peculiar reasons for keeping his name a secret; for he was living when the work arrived at a second edition. The dedication does not appear in the first; and the writer, who signs himself R. P. speaks in it of the heroine as his property. It is observable, that in all the editions we have met with, the initials R. P. are signed to the dedication, while R. S. is put in the title-page. This also looks like a negligence uncommon in authors. The dedication is to Elizabeth, Countess of Northumberland; the lady to whom Bishop Percy dedicated his 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.' We have sometimes fancied that Abraham Tucker wrote it, or Bishop Berkeley. It has all the ease and the cordial delicacy of the best days that followed the "Tatler," as well as their tendency to theological discussion. The mediocrity of the author's station in life might have been invented, to make the picture of a sea-faring philosopher more real; though the names of the children, Tommy and Pedro, hardly seem a contrast which a scholar could have allowed himself to give into. The turn of words, invented for the flying people, is copied from Swift, and cannot be called happy. There is a want of analogy in them to the smoothness, and even the energy, of flying. The ancient name of the country, Nosmnbdsgrsutt, is more fit for that of the Houhynhyms. Armdrumstake, Babbrindrugg, Crashdoorpt, and Hunkun (marriage,) and Glumm (a man,) are words too ugly for any necessity of looking natural. We are hardly reconciled to the name of Youwarkee for the heroine. Gawrey (a woman) is hardly so good; but the Graundee, the name of the flying apparatus, will do. There is a grandeur in it. We see it expand and "display its pomp," as Tasso says of the peacock. The hero's name was most likely suggested by that of a celebrated advocate of the possibility of flying, Wilkins, Bishop of Chester*. Upon the whole, if we were in possession of the Berkeley Manuscripts, we should look hard to find a memorandum indicative of the Bishop's being the author of this delightful invention. Even the miners seem to belong to the author of the Bermuda scheme; and he had traversed the seas, and been conversant with all honest paths of life. There would also have appeared to him good reason for not avowing the book, how Christian soever, when he came to be a *The Bishop is said to have been asked by the flighty Duchess of Newcastle, how people who took a voyage to the moon were to manage for " baiting-places?" to which he replied, with great felicity, that he wondered at such a question from her Grace, "who had built so many castles in the air." 2 Bishop. But these inquiries are foreign to our pages. A peacock, with his plumage displayed, full of " rainbows and starry eyes," is a fine object; but think of a lovely woman set in front of an ethereal shell, and wafted about like a Venus. This is perhaps the best general idea that can be given of Peter Wilkins's bride. In the first edition of the work, published in 1751 (at least we know of none earlier), there is an engraved explanation of the wings, or rather drapery, for such it was when at rest. It might be called a natural webbed-silk. We are to picture to ourselves a nymph in a vest of the finest texture and most delicate carnation. On a sudden, this drapery parts in two and flies back, stretched from head to foot behind the figure like an oval fan or umbrella; and the lady is in front of it, preparing to sweep blushing away from us, and "winnow the buxom air." It has been objected, that the wings of Peter's woman consist rather of something laced and webbed than proper angelical wings, that this something serves her also for drapery, that the drapery therefore is alive, and that we should be shocked to find it warm and stirring. The objection is natural in a merely animal point of view; and yet, speaking for ourselves, we confess we have been so accustomed to idealities, and to aspirations after the predominancy of moral beauty in physical, read in the eyes of simplicity what a transport it is to be loved and to piece out the instinctive consciousness of his own want of a just moral power, by the stealing of one that is unjust. Being a man, he cannot help these involuntary tributes to the soul of beauty. If it were otherwise, he would be an idiot, or a fly on the wall. We think it, therefore, perfectly natural in our friend Peter, seeing of what lovely elements the mind as well as the body of his new acquaintance is composed, to feel nothing but admiration for an appendage which doubles her power to do him good, and which realises what it is natural for us all to long for in our dreams. The wish to fly seems to belong instinctively to all imaginative states of being-to dreams, to childhood, and to love. Flying seems the next step to a higher state of being. If we could fancy human nature taking another degree in the scale, and displacing the present inhabitants of the world by a new set of creatures, personally improved, the result of a climax in refinement, what we should expect in them would be wings to their shoulders. We proceed to lay before our readers, from the complete edition of this romance*, the passages describing our hero's first knowledge of the flying people, and the account of his bride and her behaviour. day, I know not which, I very plainly heard the "As I lay awake (says our voyager) one night or sound of several human voices, and sometimes very loud; but though I could easily distinguish the articulations, I could not understand the least word that was said; nor did the voices seem at all to me like such as I had anywhere heard before, but much softer and more musical. This startled me, and I arose immediately, slipping on my clothes, and charged, being my constant travelling companion), and my cutlass. I was inclined to open the door of my ante-chamber, but I own I was afraid; besides, I considered that I could discover nothing at any distance, by reason of the thick and gloomy wood that inclosed me. that it is with an effort we allow it to be so. Supposing it, at first, to be something to which we should have to grow reconciled, we conceive, that pity for the supposed deformity would only endear us the more to the charming and perfect womanhood to which it was attached. We have often thought, that real tenderness for the sex would not be so great or so touch-taking my gun in my hand (which I always kept ing-certainly it could not be so well proved, -if women partook less than they do of imperfection. But the etherial power as well as grace belonging to our flying beauties could not long permit us to associate the idea with deformity. Our admiration of beauty, as it is, (unless we hold, with some philosophers, that it is a direct ordinance of the Divine Being), is the effect of custom and kind offices. It is true, there is something in mere smoothness and harmony of form, which appears to be sufficient of itself to affect us with pleasing emotions, distinct from any reference to moral beauty; but the last secrets of pleasures the most material are in the brain and the imagination. The lowest sensualist, if he were capable of reflection, would find that he was endeavouring to grasp some shadow of grace and kindliness, even when he fancied himself least given to such refinements. The worst like to receive pleasures from the best. The most hypocritical seducer, in the sorry improvidence of his selfishness, seeks to be mistaken for what he is not; to enjoy innocence instead of guilt; to "I had a thousand different surmises about the meaning of this odd incident; and could not conceive how any human creatures should be in my kingdom (as I called it) but myself, as I never yet saw them or any trace of their habitation. "These thoughts kept me still more within doors than before, and I hardly ever stirred out but for water or firing. At length, hearing no more voices in my mind, and at last grew persuaded it was all nor seeing any one, I began to be more composed a mere delusion, and only a fancy of mine without any real foundation: so the whole notion was soon blown over. "I had not enjoyed my tranquillity above a week * Some abridgments, purporting to be the entire work, afford almost as inadequate an idea of it in spirit as in letter. One or two of Stothard's designs, in the edition in the Novelist's Magazine," do justice to the grace and delicacy of the heroine. before my fears were roused afresh, hearing the same sound of voices twice in the same night, but not many minutes at a time, and I was resolved not to venture out; but then I determined, if they should come again anything near my grotto, to open the door, see who they were, and stand upon my defence, whatever came of it. Thus had I formed my scheme, but I heard no more of them for a great while, so that at length I became tranquil again. "I passed the summer (though I had never yet seen the sun's body) very much to my satisfaction: partly in the work I had been describing (for I had taken two more seals, and had a great quantity of oil from them,) partly in building me a chimney in my ante-chamber of mud and earth burnt on my own hearth into a sort of brick; in making a window at one end of the above-said chamber, to let in what little light would come through the trees when I did not choose to open my door; in moulding an earthen lamp for my oil; and finally in providing and laying stores, fresh and salt (for I had now cured and dried many more fish), against winter. These I say were my summer employments at home, intermixed with many agreeable excursions. But now the winter coming on, and the days growing very short, or indeed there being no day, properly speaking, but a kind of twilight, kept mostly in my habitation, though not so much as I had done the winter before, when I had no light within doors, and slept, or at least lay still, great part of my time; for now my lamp was never out. I also turned two of my seal-skins into a rug to cover my bed, and the third into a cushion, which I always sat upon, and a very soft warm cushion it made. All this together rendered my life very easy, nay even comfortable; but a little while after the darkness or twilight came on, I frequently heard the voices again; sometimes in great numbers. This threw me into new fears, and I became as uneasy as ever, even to the degree of growing quite melancholy. "At length one night, or day, I cannot say which, hearing the voices very distinctly, and praying very earnestly to be either delivered from the uncertainty they had put me under, or to have them removed from me, I took courage, and arming myself with a gun, listened to distinguish from whence the voices proceeded; when I felt such a thump upon the roof of my ante-chamber as shook the whole fabric, and set me all over into a tremor ; I then heard a sort of shriek and a rustle near the door of my apartment; all which together seemed very terrible. But I having before determined to see what and who it was, resolutely opened my door, and leaped out. I saw nobody; all was quite silent, and nothing that I could perceive, but my own fears, a-moving. I went then softly to the corner of my building, and there looking down, by the glimmer of my lamp, which stood in the window, I saw something in human shape lying at my feet. I asked, Who's there? No one answering, I was induced to take a near view of the object. But judge of my astonishment when I discovered the face of the most lovely and beautiful woman eyes ever beheld! I stood for a few seconds transfixed with astonishment, and my heart was ready to force its way through my sides. length, somewhat recovering, I perceived her At more minutely. But if I was puzzled at beholding a woman alone in this lonely place, how much more was I surprised at her appearance and dress. She had a sort of brown chaplet, like lace, round her head, under and about which her hair was tucked up and twined; and she seemed to me to be clothed in a thin hair-coloured silk garment, which upon trying to raise her, I found to be quite warm, and, therefore hoped there was life in the body it contained. I then took her in my arms, and conveyed her through the door-way into my grotto: where I laid her upon my bed. "When I laid her down, I thought, on laying my hand on her breast, I perceived the fountain of life had some motion. This gave me infinite pleasure; so warming a drop of wine I dipped my finger in it and moistened her lips two or three times, and I imagined they opened a little. Upon this I bethought me, and taking a tea-spoon, I gently poured a few drops of the wine by that means into her mouth. Finding she swallowed it, I poured in another spoonful and another, till I brought her to herself so well as to be able to sit up. "I then spoke to her, and asked her divers ques. tions as if she understood me; in return of which she uttered language I had no idea of, though in the most musical tone, and with the sweetest accent I ever heard. "You may imagine we stared heartily at each other, and I doubted not but she wondered as much as I by what means we came so near each other. I offered her everything in my grotto which I thought might please her; some of which she gratefully received, as appeared by her looks and behaviour. But she avoided my lamp, and always placed her back towards it. I observed that, and took care to set it in such a position myself as seemed agreeable to her, though it deprived me of a prospect I very much admired. "After we had sat a good while, now and then I may say, chattering to one another, she got up and took a turn or two about the room. When I saw her in that attitude, her grace and motion perfectly charmed me, and her shape was incomparable; but the straitness of her dress put me to a loss to conceive either what it was, or how it was put on. "Well, we supped together, and I set the best of everything I had before her, nor could either of us forbear speaking in our own tongue, though we were sensible neither of us understood the other. After supper I gave her some of my cordials, for which she showed great tokens of thankfulness. When supper had been some time over, I showed her my bed and made signs for her to go to it; but she seemed very shy of that, till I showed her where I meant to lie myself, by pointing to myself, then to that, and again pointing to her and to my bed. When at length I had made this matter intelligible to her, she lay down very composedly; and after I had taken care of my fire, and set the things I had been using for supper in their places, I laid myself down too. "I treated her for some time with all the respect imaginable, and never suffered her to do the least part of my work. It was very inconvenient to both of us only to know each other's meaning by. signs; but I could not be otherwise than pleased to see, that she endeavoured all in her power to learn to talk like me. Indeed, I was not behind |