was right), he made wonderful way with women. These seemed to think that they might do as they pleased with a rather effeminate being, who seemed to belong as much to them as to the other sex. However, the manly heart was not lacking, and it did not pass unscathed. When a certain artiste blighted some tender aspirations of his by marrying another, Chorley made this remarkable record in his diary: "One gives out so much more sympathy to them than to those of any other class; one gets back so much less. They are not things for long leases! If one could, how much the best would it be to live totally alone! I think I have had to uncoil my tendrils so often that I shall come to this before very long-to the smooth face which tells nothing, and the smooth heart which feels little." Chorley was still more unfortunate in the case where he made his one offer of marriage. It was declined, but it is satisfactory to know that though the disappointment was a very severe one, his subsequent relations with the author of it were frank and unembittered." He found, however, like most men, that it was not good to be alone; and in 1858 he made this mournful entry in his journal: " moved to tears, and full of those hopeless yearnings for rest, for affection, for something to lean on, on earth, which I am now sure is not my appointment. As God wills!"

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This brief but significant record reminds us of some of the writer's pithy sayings. These are characteristic of the man. Among them we notice the following, given here as samples: "That child's first sorrow, which is called a schoolmaster." In allusion to dinner-table hospitality, he notes the very best quality in the words, "exquisiteness, without that super-delicacy which oppresses by its extravagance." And he truly says of days when the saying was extant, "Show me a great fiddler, and I'll show you a great fool," that at such a period "a musician was hardly a man." To have given a boy a musical education would have been considered a degradation. Chorley's pithy description of Bulwer (Lord Lytton will always be best known by the name which he first made famous): "He is a thoroughly satin character; but then it is the richest satin. Whether it will wear as well as other less glossy materials remains to be seen. It is a fine, energetic, inquisitive, romantic mind, if I mistake not, which has been blighted and opened too soon." We can only say we would have as much premature opening and blight in a fresh author every year. Bulwer was jealous of men of fine presence. He was uneasy at the personal advantages of D'Orsay, who was living; and he valued Voltaire, who was dead, as much on being a tall man as on his satires or essays. Alluding to the bold scepticism of Sir Charles and Lady Morgan, Chorley says, "Both, like all the sceptics I have ever approached, were already prejudiced and proof against new impressions." There was more of pithiness in what Chorley once wrote in reference to the

cemetery of Père La Chaise: "The view thence, over Paris, is superb. Was the site of this cemetery chosen with the same view that made the Indian be buried on the summit of a high hill that overlooked his favourite hunting-ground ?" Chorley's impressions of an Italian crowd were summed up in five words: "Much garlic and little soap." His measure of the men who pass for poets when they are merely versifiers (he himself preferred Crabbe to Tennyson) may be guessed from what he says of the times: "This age of jargon, this time when whiting's eyes by so many are permitted to pass as pearls." The most grimly humorous of his pithy sayings was when the house agent went with him over the house he had taken in Eaton Place, and half apologized for the narrowness of the staircase. "Never mind," replied Chorley, "I shall require a very narrow coffin." Well may the agent have remarked: "I have sold a great many leases of similar houses, sir, but I never heard a gentleman make such an observation before." When Chorley lay in his narrow coffin, as he foresaw it, there lay on each side of him a branch from the cedar-trees under which he had often happily reclined at Gad's Hill. He had asked that they should be sent to him, for this special purpose. With this trait of his tenderness of feeling, we part appropriately from a man who belonged to the noble army of workers, and whose real merits were only known to the few who were on the closest terms with him of intimacy and friendship.

Thoughts of an English Tourist

On his being informed that the Irish Parliament House in College Green, Dublin, was turned into a Bank.

We all know that Judas was led to betray
The Master he served, for his own dirty pelf;
But he proved his repentance by casting away
The cash he'd received, and by hanging himself.

Thus Irish political bagmen of old

Higgled, bargained, and, lastly, their country betrayed. Judas only got silver, they stood upon gold,

And both won the scorn of the parties who paid.

Here the parallel ends. He repented: not they.

He hanged himself: they were too shrewd to be rash. For on the same place where they settled the pay

They erected a Bank, and invested the cash.

E. H.

Richard Steele.

HUMAN life is a mere inheritance of regrets: those who have no hope for the future often commit suicide, like Londonderry and Romilly, or go mad, like Swift. The most successful of men, if they have any conscience left, live only to deplore the fact that they have not done one-half what they could have done under other circumstances, and that those circumstances were, nine times out of ten, after the first success, potentially of their own creation. Sir Richard Steele, not entirely an unsuccessful man, must have thought somewhat with us when he took his inheritance of regrets to Carmarthen and lay down to die-when he, as Swift says, with his cruel untruth,

"From perils of a hundred gaols

Withdrew, to starve and die in Wales."

That the above lines are utterly untrue we need hardly say. When the Dean was offended he grew angry; when he grew angry he remained so; when he was in a permanent state of anger he was probably one of the most unscrupulous men who ever lived. Steele went to Carmarthen to die, but hardly a beggar; his creditors were almost paid, and a balance was left for his daughter. Regrets and failures he had for his portion, beyond the portion of most men; but his end was tolerably peaceful, considering that he was a disappointed man. It is possible that most of our readers would elect to die like Richard Steele, and not as his bitter enemy, Jonathan Swift; there is a difference between dying mad with baffled ambition like Swift, and sinking quietly down like a tired child as did Steele.

Their quarrels are finished now, and let us hope that their regrets for them are over also; light lie the earth over both their hearts, for with all their faults and errors they are dear friends to every one speaking or reading the English language. Out from the confused dark night of early childish recollection two white hands are stretched towards us before all others. One points to gigantic figures upon the wall, when the nursery light is growing dim, and we perchance are getting frightened: there is no need to fear; it is only the hand of Lemuel Gulliver; and the Brobdingnags on the wall are only the shades of the sleeping nursemaid. Where does this other hand point, while we sit up in our cribs, with the Lilliputians crowding over our bed, and binding us with cords not to be loosened until the earth goes on our coffin? This second hand points downstairs, where

the Christmas music is playing, and our sisters are footing it in the dance with Sir Roger de Coverley. Gulliver and Sir Roger-Swift and Steele are almost our earliest friends, when all is said and done. More than one other writer may have said this in better language than our own, but the fact is the same. Human life is made up of regrets, we repeat, and many of those regrets arise from the death or estrangement of early friends; many die and are forgotten, others by no means develop into what we in our boyish ardour expected; and with regard to others again, we wonder how we ever could have believed in them for a moment; Sir Roger and Gulliver, however, are among the few ideal friends who kept their own place: of Sir Roger we still believe that he is the most charming old gentleman in existence, and that paper 410 was written by Tickell and not by Steele; of Gulliver we retain the opinion that he was a gentleman of agreeable manners, combining strong political and social opinions with the modesty which is the inseparable accident of all great travellers. We defend neither on all points; Sir Roger frequently laid himself out to misconstruction, and Gulliver's behaviour on one occasion, at the court of Lilliput, was ill-considered. Certainly in compassing his political ruin it was rather hard of his enemies to rake up an old statute against him, but the St. Pancras Vestry are doing exactly the same in raking up an act of the godly Charles the Second against Sunday traders: on all details we are not answerable for either Gulliver or Sir Roger, but they are certainly the first, and, with few exceptions, the most lasting of our friends.

There was a wild delusion afloat in our youth that 'Gulliver's Travels' and the 'Spectator' were both "British classics," and might consequently be put into the hands of childhood; from that cause, probably, we so early made the acquaintance of Sir Roger and Mr. Gulliver. We can only say that more people must have talked about those books than have read them: there is a coolness about parts of both which we will not discuss in an age when Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' are elegantly published in extenso, and only not read because a great majority of people are puzzled at the dialect. But it must be said, as a general rule, as regards both Swift and Steele, that the flies can be put on one plate and the butter on another: both are capable of being Bowdlerised; a Bowdlerised Smollett would be rather dull reading. Mr. Thackeray goes as far as to say that 'Humphrey Clinker' is "surely the funniest book ever written;" will any one undertake to read the 'fun' at a penny reading, before workingmen's wives? It is extremely strange that both Mr. Dickens and Mr. Thackeray, two men whose writings were so singularly pure, should have quoted Smollett as such a witty writer, and have considered him, or affected to consider him, their master; it would puzzle any one