In vain! for, by all the powers which animate the organ-Widow Wadman's left eye shines this moment as lucid as her right;there is neither mote, nor sand, nor dust, nor chaff, nor speck, nor particle of opaque matter floating in it. There is nothing, my dear paternal uncle! but one lambent delicious fire, furtively shooting out from every part of it, in all directions into thine.

If thou lookest, uncle Toby, in search of this mote one moment longer, thou art undone.

me how much I had taken care for? Upon telling him the exact sum, Eugenius shook his head and said it would not do; so pulled out his purse, in order to empty it into mine. I've enough, in conscience, Eugenius, said I. Indeed Yorick, you have not, replied Eugenius; I know France and Italy better than you. But you don't consider, Eugenius, said I, refusing his offer, that before I have been three days in Paris, I shall take care to say or do something or other for which I shall get clapped up into the Bastile, and that I shall live there a couple of months entirely at

-It is not in the white, said Mrs. Wadman. -My uncle Toby looked with might and main into the pupil.

Now, of all the eyes which ever were created, from your own, madam, up to those of Venus herself, which certainly were as venereal a pair of eyes as ever stood in a head, there never was an eye of them all so fitted to rob my uncle Toby of his repose as the very eye at which he was looking. It was not, madam, a rolling eye,-a romping, or a wanton one;-nor was it an eye sparkling, petulant, or imperiousof high claims and terrifying exactions, which would have curdled at once that milk of human nature of which my uncle Toby was made up; --but 'twas an eye full of gentle salutations, and soft responses,-speaking, not like the trumpet-stop of some ill-made organ, in which many an eye I talk to, holds coarse converse, but whispering soft,-like the last low accents of an expiring saint,-"How can you live comfortless, Captain Shandy, and alone, without a bosom to lean your head on,-or trust your cares to?"

It was an eye

Now the event I had treated gaily came seriously to my door.

Is it folly, or nonchalance, or philosophy, or pertinacity;—or what is it in me, that, after all, when La Fleur had gone down stairs, and I was quite alone, I could not bring down my mind to think of it otherwise than I had then spoken of it to Eugenius?

-And as for the Bastile-the terror is in the word.-Make the most of it you can, said I to myself, the Bastile is but another word for a tower ;-and a tower is but another word for a house you can't get out of.-Mercy on the gouty! for they are in it twice a year.— But with nine livres a day, and pen and ink and paper and patience, albeit a man can't get out, he may do very well within,-at least for a month or six weeks; at the end of which, if he is a harmless fellow, his innocence appears, and he comes out a better and wiser man than he went in.

I had some occasion (I forget what) to step into the court-yard, as I settled this account; and remember I walked down stairs in no

It did my uncle Toby's business.

THE BASTILE v. LIBERTY.

(FROM 'A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.")

-And here, I know, Eugenius, thou wilt smile at the remembrance of a short dialogue which passed betwixt us, the moment I was going to set out.-I must tell it here.

Eugenius, knowing that I was as little subject to be overburthened with money as

ing.

Beshrew the sombre pencil! said I, vauntingly-for I envy not its power, which paints the evils of life with so hard and deadly a colouring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and blackened; reduce them to their proper size and hue, she overlooks them. 'Tis true, said I, correcting the proposition-the Bastile is not an evil to be despised. But strip it of its towers-fill up the foss-unbarricade the doors-call it simply a confinement, and suppose 'tis some tyrant of a distemper-and not of a man, which holds you in it-the evil vanishes, and you bear the other half without complaint.

In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and, looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage. "I can't get out-I can't get out," said the starling.

I stood looking at the bird; and to every person who came through the passage, it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approached it, with the same lamentation of its captivity, "I can't get out," said the starling. God help thee! said I,--but I'll let thee out, cost what it will; so I turned about the cage to get the door: it was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces. I took both hands to it.

The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and, thrusting his head through the trellis, pressed his breast against it, as if impatient. I fear, poor creature, said I, I cannot set thee at liberty. "No," said the starling; "I can't get out-I can't get out."

I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened; nor do I remember an incident in my life where the dissipated spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly called home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile; and I heavily walked up stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them.

Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery, said I, still thou art a bitter draught! and, though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.-'Tis thou, thrice sweet and gracious goddess, addressing myself to Liberty, whom all, in public or in private, worship, whose taste is grateful, and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall change. No tint of words can spot thy snowy mantle, nor chymic power turn thy sceptre into iron;—with thee, to smile upon him as he eats his crust, the swain is happier than his monarch, from whose court thou art exiled.-Gracious Heaven! cried I, kneeling down upon the last step but one in my ascent, grant me but health, thou great Bestower of it, and give

Yorick was this parson's name, and, what is very remarkable in it (as appears from a most ancient account of the family, wrote upon strong vellum, and now in perfect preservation), it had been exactly so spelt for nearI was within an ace of saying nine hundred years; but I would not shake my credit in telling an improbable truth-however indisputable in itself;—and, therefore, I shall content myself with only saying-It had been exactly so spelt, without the least variation or transposition of a single letter, for I do not know how long; which is more than I would venture to say of one half of the best surnames in the kingdom; which, in a course of years, have generally undergone as many chops and changes as their owners.-Has this been owing to the pride, or to the shame, of the respective proprietors?-In honest truth, I think sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other, just as the temptation has wrought. But a villainous affair it is, and will one day so blend and confound us altogether that no one shall be able to stand up and swear “That his own great-grandfather was the man who did either this or that."

This evil has been sufficiently fenced against by the prudent care of the Yorick family, and their religious preservation of these records I quote; which do farther inform us that the family was originally of Danish extraction, and had been transplanted into England as early as in the reign of Horwendilus, king of Denmark, in whose court, it seems, an ancestor of this Mr. Yorick, and from whom he was lineally descended, held a considerable post to the day of his death. Of what nature this considerable post was this record saith not— it only adds that, for near two centuries, it had been totally abolished as altogether unnecessary, not only in that court, but in every other court of the Christian world.

It has often come into my head that this post could be no other than that of the king's chief jester; and that Hamlet's Yorick, in our Shakspere, many of whose plays, you know,