Moved by the terror I betray'd,
And wishing to dispatch me quicker,
He flourish'd an alarming blade,

Whose very aspect made me sicker:
To work he went-my throat soon ran
With blood from an incision given;
More than half dead, I then began

To recommend my soul to Heaven. The cut-throat presently repenting

That all my pangs should thus be sped, Stepp'd back, and then came on, presenting A sort of fire-arm at my head. He seized me by the throttle fast,

Until my visage black became ;
And then, to finish all at last,

Th' assassin took deliberate aim.
Amazement! spite of all his pains,
By miracle I 'scaped his ire,
For meaning to blow out my brains,
The powder hit me-not the fire.
Madden'd to find his purpose balk’d,

He tried a different method quite,
In clouds of dust, as round he stalk'd,
Striving to stifle me outright.

As fate still saved me from his fangs,
And Death was slow to grant his prayer,

In order to increase my pangs,

He twisted, pull'd and tore my hair.

I gave a sigh-th' assassin prone
To let no prize his clutches pass,
Snatch'd up my purse beside me thrown,
And then prepared my Coup-de-grace.

At this transported more and more,
My knife (of bone) I fiercely drew ;

My adversary gain'd the door,
And in a glass my face I view.

Guess my surprise-my joy to see,

That the assassin who distress'd me,
Instead of mortal injury,

Had kindly powder'd, shaved, and dress'd me!

ON LIPS AND KISSING.

"But who those ruddy lips can miss,

Which blessed still themselves do kiss."

How various, delicate, and delightful, are the functions of the lips! I purpose not to treat them anatomically, or I might expatiate on the exquisite flexibility of those muscles, which, by the incalculable modulations they accomplish, supply different languages to all the nations of the earth, and hardly ever fatigue the speaker, though they so often prove wearisome to the auditor. Nor shall I dwell upon the opposite impressions which their exercise is calculated to excite, from the ruby mouth of a Corinna, to the lean-lipped Xantippe, deafening her hen-pecked mate, or the gruff voice of the turnkey who wakes you out of a sound sleep, to tell you it is seven o'clock, and you must get up directly to be hanged. But I shall proceed at once to external beauty, although it must be admitted, before I enter into the mouth of my subject, that there is no fixed standard of perfection for this feature, either in form or colour. Poor Mungo Park, after having turned many African women sick, and frightened others into fits, by his unnatural whiteness, was once assured by a kind-hearted woolly-headed gentleman,

that, though he could not look upon him without an involuntary disgust, he only felt the more compassion for his misfortune; and upon another occasion, he overheard a jury of matrons debating whether a female could be found in any country to kiss such emaciated and frightful lips. How Noah's grandchildren, the African descendants of Ham, came to be black, has never yet been satisfactorily explained, and it were therefore vain to inquire into the origin of their enormous lips, which do not seem better adapted to a hot climate than our own; but there is good reason to believe that the ancient Egyptians were as ponderously provided in this respect as their own bull-god, for the Sphinx has a very Nubian mouth, and the Memnon's head, so far from giving us the idea of a musical king who could compete with Pan or Apollo, rather tempts us to exclaim in the language of Dryden

"Thou sing with him, thou booby! never pipe

Was so profaned to touch that blubber'd lip."

A more angular and awkward set of two-legged animals seem never to have existed. They must have worshipped monkies on account of their resemblance to their own human form divine; and we cannot attribute their appearance to the unskilfulness of the artist rather than the deformity of the subject, for the drawings of animals are always accurate, and sometimes extremely graceful.

All this only makes it the more wonderful that Cecrops, by leading a colony from the mouths of the Nile to Attica, should found a nation which, to say

nothing of its surpassing pre-eminence in arts and arms, attained in a short period that exquisite proportion and beauty of form of which they have left us memorials in their glorious statues, and have thus eternally fixed the European standard of symmetry and loveliness. The vivid fancy of the Greeks not only peopled woods, waves, and mountains with imaginary beings, but by a perpetual intermingling of the physical and moral world, converted their arms, instruments, and decorations into types and symbols, thus elevating inanimate objects into a series of hieroglyphics, as they had idealised their whole system of mythology into a complicated allegory. To illustrate this by recurring to the subject of our essay. Many people contemplate the classical bow of the ancients without recollecting that its elegant shape is supplied originally by Nature, as it is an exact copy of the line described by the surface of the upper lip. It is only by recalling this circumstance that we can fully appreciate that curious felicity which appropriated the lip-shaped bow to Apollo the god of eloquence, and to Cupid the god of love, thus typifying that amorous shaft, which is never so powerfully shot into the heart as through the medium of a kiss. It is in this spirit of occult as well as visible beauty that classical antiquity should be felt and studied. No upper lip can be pronounced beautiful unless it have this line as distinctly defined as I now see it before me in a sleeping infant. I am sorry to be personal towards my readers, particularly those of the fair sex, but, my dear Madam, it is useless to consult your glass, or complain that the mirrors are

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are

not half so well made now as they were when you were younger. By biting them you may indeed make your lips blush deeper sweets,” but you cannot bid them display the desiderated outline. Such vain endeavours, like the formal mumbling of prayers, but useless formalities and lip-labour." Yours are, in fact, (be it spoken in a whisper,) what a friend of mine denominates sixpenny lips, from their tenuity, and maintains them to be indicative of deceit. He, however, is a physiognomist, which I am not, or at least only to a very modified extent. All those muscles which are flexible and liable to be called into action by the passions may, I conceive, permanently assume some portion of the form into which they are most frequently thrown, and thus betray to us the predominant feelings of the mind; but as no emotions can influence the collocation of our features, or the fixed constituents of our frame, I have no faith in their indications. As to the craniologists and others who maintain that we are made angels and devils, not by wings at our shoulders or tails at our backs, but by the primitive bosses upon our skulls, I recommend them a voyage to one of the South Sea islands, where they will find the usual diversity of individual character, although all the infants' heads are put into a frame at the birth, and compelled to grow up in the shape of a sugar-loaf. Not that Spurzheim would be embarrassed by this circumstance. He would only pronounce from their mitre-like configuration that they had the organ of Episcopativeness.

Nay, Miss, I have not been so absorbed in this lit