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them into dust-holes and soot-bags, under the fashionable pretext of taking snuff; an abomination for which Sir Walter Raleigh is responsible, and which ought to have been included in the articles of his impeachment. When some "Sir Plume, of amber snuffbox justly vain," after gently tapping its top with a look of diplomatic complacency, embraces a modicum of its contents with his finger and thumb, curves round his hand, so as to display the brilliant on his little finger, and commits the high-dried pulvilio to the air, so that nothing but its impalpable aroma ascends into his nose, we may smile at the custom as a harmless and not ungraceful foppery: but when a filthy clammy compost is perpetually thrust up the nostrils with a voracious pig-like snort, it is a practice as disgusting to the beholders as I believe it to be injurious to the offender. The nose is the emunctory of the brain, and when its functions are impeded, the whole system of the head becomes deranged. A professed snuff-taker is generally recognisable by his total loss of the sense of smelling-by his snuffling and snorting-by his pale sodden complexion-and by that defective modulation of the voice, called talking through the nose, though it is in fact an inability so to talk, from the partial or total stoppage of the passage. Not being provided with an ounce of civet, I will not suffer my imagination to wallow in all the revolting concomitants of this dirty trick; but I cannot refrain from an extract, by which we may form some idea of the time consumed in its performance. "Every professed, inveterate, and incurable snuff-taker, (says Lord Stanhope,) at a mo

derate computation takes one pinch in ten minutes. Every pinch, with the agreeable ceremony of blowing and wiping the nose, and other incidental circumstances, consumes a minute and a half. One minute and a half, out of every ten, allowing sixteen hours to a snuff-taking day, amounts to two hours and twentyfour minutes out of every natural day, or one day out of every ten. One day out of every ten amounts to thirty-six days and a half in a year. Hence, if we suppose the practice to be persisted in forty years, two entire years of the snuff-taker's life will be dedicated to tickling his nose, and two more to blowing it." Taken medicinally, or as a simple sternutatory, it may be excused; but the moment your snuff is not to be sneezed at, you are the slave of a habit which literally makes you grovel in the dust: your snuff-box has seized you as Saint Dunstan did the Devil, and if the red-hot pincers, with which he performed the feat, could occasionally start up from an Ormskirk snuff-box, it might have a salutary effect in checking this propensity among our real and pseudo-fashionables.

It was my intention to have written a dissertation upon the probable form of the nose mentioned in Solomon's Song, which, we are informed, was like "the tower of Lebanon looking toward Damascus ;" and I had prepared some very erudite conjectures as to the composition of the perfume which suggested to Catullus the magnificent idea of wishing to be all nose :

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But I apprehend my readers will begin to think I have led them by the nose quite long enough; and lest they should suspect that I am making a handle of the subject, I shall conclude at once with a

SONNET TO MY OWN NOSE.

O nose! thou rudder in my face's centre,
Since I must follow thee until I die,-
Since we are bound together by indenture,
The master thou, and the apprentice I,-
O be to your Telemachus a Mentor,

Though oft invisible, for ever nigh;
Guard him from all disgrace and misadventure,
From hostile tweak, or Love's blind mastery.
So shalt thou quit the city's stench and smoke,
For hawthorn lanes, and copses of young oak,

Scenting the gales of Heaven, that have not yet
Lost their fresh fragrance since the morning broke,
And breath of flowers" with rory May-dews wet,"
The primrose-cowslip-blue-bell-violet.

WALKS IN THE GARDEN.-No. I.

Heureux qui, dans le sein de ses dieux domestiques,
Se dérobe au fracas des tempêtes publiques,
Et dans un doux abri, trompant tous les regards,
Cultive ses jardins, les vertus, et les arts.

DELILLE.

A GENTLE fertilizing shower has just fallen-the light clouds are breaking away-a rainbow is exhibiting itself half athwart the horizon, as the sun shoots

forth its rays with renewed splendour, and the reader is invited to choose the auspicious moment, and accompany the writer into his garden. He will not exclaim with Dr. Darwin,

"Stay your rude steps! whose throbbing breasts enfold

The legion fiends of glory or of gold ;”

but he would warn from his humble premises all those who have magnificent notions upon the subject; who despise the paltry pretensions of a bare acre of ground scarcely out of the smoke of London, and require grandeur of extent and expense before they will condescend to be interested. To such he would recommend the perusal of Spence's translation from the Jesuits' Letters, giving an account of the Chinese emperor's pleasure-ground, which contained 200 palaces, besides as many contiguous ones for the eunuchs, all gilt, painted, and varnished; in whose enclosure were raised hills from twenty to sixty feet high; streams and lakes, one of the latter five miles round; serpentine bridges, with triumphal arches at each end: undulating colonnades; and in the centre of the fantastic paradise a square town, each side a mile long. Or they may recreate their fancies with the stupendous hanging gardens of Babylon-a subject which no living imagination could perfectly embody and depict, unless it be his who has realised upon canvass such a glorious conception of Belshazzar's feast. Or he may peruse Sir William Temple's description of a perfect garden, with its equilateral parterres, fountains, and statues, "so necessary to break the effect of large grass-plots, which, he thinks, have an ill ef

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fect upon the eye;" its four quarters regularly divided by gravel walks, with statues at the intersections; its terraces, stone flights of steps, cloisters covered with lead, and all the formal filigree-work of the French and Dutch schools.-If the reader be a lover of poetry, let him forget for a moment, if he can, the fine taste and splendid diction of Milton, in describing the Garden of Eden, the happy abode of our first parents— -From that sapphire fount the crisped brooks, Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold, With mazy error under pendant shades Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed Flow'rs worthy of Paradise, which not nice art In beds and curious knots, but nature boon, Pour'd forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain, Both where the morning sun first warmly smote The open field, and where the unpierced shade Imbrown'd the noontide bowers. Thus was this place A happy, rural seat of various view."

Let him also banish from his recollection the far-famed garden of Alcinous, which however, as Walpole justly observes, after being divested of Homer's harmonious Greek and bewitching poetry, was a small orchard and vineyard, with some beds of herbs, and two fountains that watered them, enclosed within a quickset-hedge, and its whole compass only four acres. Such was the rural magnificence which was in that age deemed an appropriate appendage to a palace with brazen walls and columns of silver.-Modern times, however, have shewn us how much may be accomplished in a small space. Pope, with the assistance of Lord Peterborough, "to form his quincunx, and to

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