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 hackney-coachman. Does she think that her rosy lips were made to grow pale about two-and-sixpence; or that the expres sion 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 boys 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 boardingschool, 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 hackney-coaches 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 demons. 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 stone-mason'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 beheld 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

honorable 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 recognized 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 anywhere, 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.

CHAPTER 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 imagination to shuddering.

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

*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.

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 odor 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 con

tradicting 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 principles 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 endeavor 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 to