and distinguished in their fleeting generation, to reflect what nameless nothings some of their once proud possessors would have now become, but that they threw their crumbs from their table to some poor devil of an author; and by having their names foisted into a Dedication, were preserved from oblivion, as straws and gilded flies are enshrined in amber, and beetles and crawling things occasionally eternised in petrifactions. Such is the difference between the aristocracy of nature and of courts ;-the nobility of genius, and that of stars and ribands. This becomes ludicrously striking, when the author, who holds no patent of nobility but that which God has signed, addresses his patron, some titled amateur scribbler, and requests the sanction of his celebrity that he may descend to posterity with his lordship or his grace, who in the course of a few years is only unearthed from his illustrious obscurity by the digging of commentators.

Take for instance, the following passage from Dryden's Dedication of the Rival Ladies, to the Right Honourable the Earl of Orrery :-"I have little reason to desire you for my judge, for who could so severely judge of faults as he who has given testimony he commits none? Your excellent poems have afforded that knowledge of it to the world, that your enemies are ready to upbraid you with it, as a crime for a man of business to write so well. ****** There is no chance which you have not foreseen; all your heroes are more than your subjects they are your creatures; and though they seem to move freely in all the sallies of their passions, yet you make destinies for them

which they cannot shun. They are moved (if I may dare to say so) like the rational creatures of the almighty poet, who walk at liberty in their own opinion because their fetters are invisible. *** I have dwelt, my Lord, thus long upon your writings, not because you deserve no greater and more noble commendations, but because I am not equally able to express them in other subjects," &c. &c. Who knows any thing nowa-days of his lordship's plays and poems, except from this passage?-Let us make another citation from the same author's Dedication of "An Evening's Love," to "His Grace William Duke of Newcastle, one of his Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, and of the most noble Order of the Garter," &c. &c.-" Methinks I behold in you another Caius Marius, who in the extremity of his age exercised himself almost every morning in the Campus Martius, amongst the youthful nobility of Rome. And afterwards in your retirement, when you do honour to poetry by employing part of your leisure in it, I regard you as another Silius Italicus, who, having past over his consulship with applause, dismissed himself from business and the gown, and employed his age amongst the shades in the reading and imitation of Virgil." His Grace's plays, like himself, have passed away, leaving nothing but their titles behind them; and his literary celebrity is destined to be solely upheld by his splendid folio on Horsemanship, still occasionally encountered in collections of scarce rubbish, where, after the noble author has been engraved in every possible attitude and dress, he is at length represented mounted on Pegasus, as a poet

should be, and in the act of ascending from a circle of houyhnhnms, kneeling around him in the act of ado

ration.

But for Pope's exquisite mock-heroic, what should we have known of Lord Petre, the lock-severing peer; or of Mrs. Arabella Fermor, from whom the fatal ringlet was excised; or of Sir George Brown, the Sir Plume of the Poem, who, in Bowles's splenetic edition, smirks at us in an engraving in all the self-satisfaction of a black wig, embroidered sleeve, and silken sash? After strutting their little hour upon the stage of life, they would long since have sunk into their original dust, and the passing of a single century would have overwhelmed them in impenetrable oblivion.

Patrician and wealthy readers! I implore you to bear in mind that Cheops and Cephrenes, who entrusted their preservation to the Pyramids, have been filched from their sarcophagi, and nobody knows by whom. I invite you to contemplate that affecting rebuke of ancestral pride, the burial-place of Thebes, whence the mummies of the whole aristocracy are dug up as fuel, cut into hundred and half hundred weights, and sold to the Arabs for the purpose of heating their ovens. Now, if they had committed the preservation of their name and exploits to some competent poet, they might have abandoned their earthly tegument to its kindred element ;-they could not altogether have perished. Had they been embalmed in verse, they need not have been solicitous about pickling their bodies. I counsel you seriously to perpend what Epicurus wrote to Idomeneus: "All the glory and gran

deur of Persia, even should you succeed in all your undertakings, will never equal the honour conferred on you by my letters ;"-and that Seneca, writing to Lucullus, says; “I have credit with posterity, and can confer immortality upon you:" both of which assertions have been abundantly verified. But it is useless to multiply examples, or accumulate exhortations. Mine, I repeat, is the sole perpetuity. I have a seat to sell, not in a certain House, but in an imperishable vehicle just about to start for posterity. I have a portion of immortality to dispose of; and that it may be fairly knocked down to the highest bidder, I request that all offers and tenders may be sent to the publishers, postage paid, it being always understood that the fortunate purchaser of my Dedication must undertake to get my work noticed in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, or I will not answer for the sale of my first edition.

THE MISERIES OF REALITY.

66

Expectation whirls me round;

Th' imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense."

SHAKSPEARE.

I WISH I had been born in that bloom and spring of the young world which modern phlegmatists presume to denominate the fabulous ages. To have died then would have been better than to live now; for me

thinks I might have left a name alone whose shadowy existence should have been sweeter than my present dull and lustreless vitality. When the beautiful Helle fell from the golden-fleeced ram into the sea, since called the Hellespont, I might, perchance, (for I am as stout a swimmer as Leander,) have supported her fainting loveliness to the Propontic shore ;-might I not have arrested the flight of Cupid when the fatal curiosity of the trembling Psyche shook the oil from her suspended lamp and broke his slumbers; or have assisted Arethusa in the rescue of Proserpine, when "swarthy Dis" tore her from the flowers she was gathering "in Enna's field, beside Pergusa's lake,” and so have left my name to be entwined with those rose-like nymphs in the unfading wreaths of poesy?— Of one thing I am confident; I should have joined the expedition of the Argonauts. My feet would have instinctively hurried me to the sea-shore,

"When Hercules advanced with Hylas in his hand,
Where Castor and Pollux stood ready on the strand,
And Orpheus with his harp, and Jason with his sword,
Gave the signal to the heroes, when they jump'd on board ;”

for even now I have taken the same leap with my imagination. I feel myself shaking hands with the warriors and demigods, the sons of Jupiter, Neptune, Bacchus, and the winds, who formed the glorious crew; I taste the banquet and hear the music in the Cave of Chiron; I see the enamoured Naiads stretching up their white arms to pull the blooming Hylas into their fountain as he stoops to fill his vase; and I feel myself a partaker in the adventures with the