the cornices are gilt: the window-frames are broad and substantial: a spacious window-seat of oak spreads invitingly for such persons as are desirous of enrolling themselves among the "stiffnecked generation:" a large stable, out-house, and hay-loft, are cut and carved into half a dozen counting-houses for as many Jew brokers; and the grandfather of either family, inextricably painted in an oak frame over the drawing-room chimney-piece, seems to frown reproof upon his abdicating posterity.

That perpetuity of wealth which the Law abhors, the Law is not likely long to see. The citizen of London, who, during the late war, hurried from east to west, "proud as Apollo on his forked hill," is now succeeded by his spurious son Phaeton, who drives a paper car where his progenitor drove a golden one. The result is obvious to all but himself. The "starry monsters that beset his track" require more sagacity and stronger axle-trees than he possesses, to elude. Here a Bank-loan lames his off-leader; there a composition-deed loosens a linch-pin; and here "the great seal of Great Britain" trips up car, horses, and all, and lodges the luckless driver in the Gazette.

The London Opera-house, after having been tossed from Marquis to Marquis, like a musical snuff-box, has at length opened under the auspices of Mr. Ebers the Bookseller. Booksellers have, for half a century, been the best patrons of all the Muses, except Euterpe and Terpsichore: and now those two rebel ladies have also enlisted under their banners.

The Italian opera has been a subject of burlesque, in Britain, from the days of "Nicolini and the Lion," down to those of O'Keefe. Pope, who had a nice ear for numbers, but, I suspect, only an indifferent one for quavers and cadenzas, thus personifies the Italian opera of his time:

When lo! a Harlot form soft sliding by

With mincing step, shrill voice, and leering eye,
Foreign her air, her robe's discordant pride
In patch-work fluttering, and her head aside:

By singing peers upheld on either hand,

She tripp'd and laugh'd, too pretty much to stand;
Cast on the prostrate Nine a scornful look,

Then thus in quaint recitativo spoke.

And an epigrammatist of a later period gives us the following definition of that species of amusement:

An opera, like a pillory, may be said

To nail our cars down, and expose our head.

All this, as the colloquialists say, is very well for a joke; but to speak seriously, I see no reason why music should not be made as effective a vehicle for expression as speech. I admit that, inasmuch as music is a sensual pleasure, it can never be a fit vehicle

for those tragical emotions that harrow up the soul; I am also of opinion that as the Italian opera is intended to be an elegant recreation for the upper orders of society, it should always preserve a certain air of good-breeding and elegance. Its scenes of song should neither be stained by representations of plots, massacres, and high treasons, nor degraded by shews of vulgarity and petty larceny. The same observations apply to the French dancing, by which it is accompanied. Apollo and the Muses are its favourites; but it turns, or should turn, with disgust, from the skipping hilarity of an Irish wake or a Dutch fair.

Two operas have been represented during the present season. La Gazza Ladra (successfully exhibited upon the English stage under the name of the Maid and the Magpie) and Agnese, a theatrical adaptation of Mrs. Opie's pathetic tale of the Father and Daughter. If a "ghost's word" be but worth one tenth of the sum mentioned by Hamlet, the town may rest assured that neither of these subjects is fit for musical representation, in the polished language and polished emporium which Mr. Ebers has selected for their exhibition. A magpie that steals silver spoons is below the notice of the Latian Euterpe: a father who is driven to insanity by the seduction of his daughter is above it. Ambrogetti, who personated the distracted father, acted in a manner too true to nature to be endurable in art. I could illustrate this position by an anecdote of my friend Voltaire; but, as the bon mot would itself be looked upon as too natural, I shall omit it. I have no doubt that Ambrogetti might prove to demonstration, that he has paid frequent visits to Bedlam and St. Luke's; that he has seen one madman count numbers on his fingers; another take repeated pinches of snuff from his waistcoat-pocket; and a third trot twenty times round a vacant chair; and, as Dean Swift says, I should "readily believe, but not excuse him." Such actions partake too much of the vulgar to be exhibited at the Italian Opera. This certainly would not be tolerated in a representation of King Lear, upon the boards of Drury Lane. I did hope that this hankering after nature had fled, with Kean, across the Atlantic.

The poor magpie who transferred the silver spoons to the belfry of the church, was evidently no Pie Voleuse from Paris. That furtive capital would have sent hither a far more accomplished artist. She fled with the stolen property after so innocent a fashion, that I suspect Mrs. Fry had half converted her from the error of her ways. When the source of all the mischief was detected, why did Madame Vestris continue so long in the tower of the church? The three points of interest, namely, her own two legs, and Madame Camporese, were not at that period visible to the audience. Ever, while you live, keep your stage interest alive. After all, since Nature is now the cry, I should recommend it to Mr. Ebers to adopt a real Maid and a real Magpie. Two such stage-rarities would ensure him a brilliant and successful season.

ON THE CHARACTER OF SOCRATES.

THE age in which we live might, perhaps, with some propriety be called the doubting age. Our ancestors have been busied for some thousands of years in discovering and establishing truths, which we, finding that novelty is no longer to be attained by pursuing the same course, seem determined to display our ingenuity in endeavouring to overturn. Every day produces some fresh attack; and we find ourselves continually summoned to defend positions, which we had been taught from our earliest years to consider as absolutely impregnable. It is not long ago that we read the advertisement of an itinerant philosopher, who modestly proposed, in a single course of lectures, to confute the reasonings of Newton, expose the errors of the Copernican system, and restore the earth to her proper station as the centre of the material universe. Still more recently we have seen a literary knight-errant boldly sally forth with his pen in his hand, to write down the omnipotence of gravitation, and set up some crazy theory of his own to explain the planetary movements. We should not, however, quarrel with philosophical doubters, however extravagant their scepticism; for the love of novelty, if confined to those sciences the doctrines of which rely for support upon the proofs of experiment, can be of no disservice to the cause of truth. In such cases there can be no danger of mistaking paradox for aphorism. The superstructure which is built on the real basis of experiment will only be more firmly established by attempts to overthrow it. On the other hand, if there be any unsoundness in the foundation,experiment, the force of which is not weakened by time, will be as powerful to destroy as to create. The theory of gravitation will be submitted to the examination of future enquirers, without any aid from authority or tradition, to be admitted or denied according to the evidence of facts, which will present the same "ocular proof" to a philosopher a century hence, that they did to Newton a century ago. There are, however, other cases in which no such test of truth is to be found, and these are the regions in which the race of doubters love to expatiate. In history, for example, there is scarcely a fact or a character which can be so proved,

"That the probation bear no hinge nor loop

To hang a doubt upon;"

or the truth of which may not be questioned upon the authority of some contemporary contradiction. What a boundless field then is here offered for their speculations. Horace Walpole introduced this fashion of historical doubting by his amusing speculations on the character of Richard the Third; Dalrymple

followed him in an attempt of an opposite kind, by endeavouring to degrade the honoured names of Sidney and Russell from that consecrated place which they will ever occupy in the recollection of their countrymen; and we should not be much surprised at some future appeal to our sympathy in behalf of the hapless Jonathan Wild, who will, we make no doubt, turn out at last to have been a much-injured personage, and most unfeelingly misrepresented by the partial compilers of the Newgate Calendar.

We have been led into this train of reflection by the perusal of a recent outrageous attack upon the memory of Socrates;-a name which has so long commanded the respect and reverence of all nations, as to become hallowed by time; and any attempt at this time of day to defame it is, as it were, to commit a crime against human nature, amounting almost to sacrilege. The weapons for this attack have been borrowed from the preliminary discourse to Mr. Mitchell's admirable translation of Aristophanes. Mr. Mitchell, however, has not suffered the natural zeal of a translator in defence of his original, to stifle those better feelings of his nature, which teach him to do honour to the character of the sage of Athens. He does not seek to defend the poet by traducing the philosopher, as he is described to us in the glowing pages of Plato and Xenophon; but suggests a mode of reconciling the difficulties of the case, which ultimately leads to the exculpation of both. Those who deny the conclusions of his reasoning must at least admire its ingenuity; and it certainly derives some support from the admissions of Socrates himself, who is said to have acknowledged an early propensity to all the vices which the Athenian Lavater detected in his physiognomy. Mr. Mitchell's arguments, however, have been borrowed and perverted by a writer, who modestly undertakes to persuade us, that mankind have been cherishing an error for upwards of two thousand years, and that the homage which has been so long paid to the memory of the "Wisest of Men" is a mere school-boy prejudice, for which there is no foundation in truth and in fact. There is, we fear, a certain malignity in human nature, which derives gratification from depreciating whatever is great and exalted above the common standard. Hence it is that living excellence has always to encounter such a host of detractors, who deny its existence, as long as denial is possible, equivocate when they can no longer deny, and, if shamed at last into a tardy acknowledgment, take care to season their recognition with some qualifying clause, that shall furnish a future opportunity of again reducing the object of their jealousy to the same level with themselves. "Virtutem incolumem odimus" is a sentiment as old as Horace, and we fear the application of it will never be obsolete. The feeling

expressed in the latter part of the sentence, "sublatam ex oculis quærimus," is, we hope, no less natural to mankind; and if so, our readers will be as much shocked as ourselves at this violation of the immunities of the tomb, which has dragged the shade of Socrates from its place of rest, to subject him to a fresh persecution, and arraign him again at the bar of public opinion, upon charges which the malice of his contemporaries never seriously imputed to him.

We subscribe to the authority of the maxim which asserts, that as "antiquity cannot privilege an error, so novelty ought not to prejudice a truth;" but we think that the best mode of ascertaining historical truth is by a careful investigation of contemporary documents. In recurring to such authority on the present occasion, we shall endeavour to rescue the memory of Socrates from the aspersions that have been cast upon it, by recalling the attention of our readers to that picture of him which was drawn and coloured from the life.

To form a just estimate of this great philosopher, it will be advisable to take a brief view of the state of the human mind in the world in general, as well as in Athens in particular, at the period of his birth. About the commencement of the fifth century previous to the Christian æra, nature seems to have been more prolific in minds calculated to instruct and enlighten mankind, than perhaps at any other period of history; and the beneficial effects arising from their efforts, through which a subtle chain of communication might possibly have subsisted, were felt from the confines of Italy to the remotest boundaries of Asia. While Confucius was busied in forming his celebrated system of morals and legislation for the most singular of nations, Pythagoras was soaring from the schools of Magna Græcia into the regions of space, and unfolding to his confiding disciples the true theory of the universe. In another quarter the theism of Zoroaster was spreading through the vast provinces of the Persian empire; and the Sicilian Empedocles was enlarging the bounds of human knowledge in the three great branches of natural science. In Athens, the sensorium of Greece, the arts had been carried to perfection under the patronage of Pericles, and the ideas of men were exalted by the sublime speculations of Anaxagoras. The most abstruse points of philosophy began to be discussed. Literature was hastening to its zenith. Thucydides had already surpassed the great father of history; tragedy was now to imbibe new pathos from the soul of Euripides, the contemporary and friend of Socrates, and the most daring flight of the lyric muse was manifested in the wild effusions of Pindar:

pure

Sailing with supreme dominion

Through the azure deep of air.