saying, "Come in,” the door was held again by somebody for a few seconds, during which there was a loud and apparently angry whisper of voices. Our heroine, not without agitation, heard the words, "No, no!" and "Yes," repeated with vehemence, and then, "I tell you I must and will; she will forgive you, be assured, and me too, for she'll never see me again." And at these words the door was opened by a gallant-looking young man, who closed it behind him, and advancing with a low bow, spoke as follows:

"If you are alarmed, madam, which I confess you reasonably may be at this intrusion, I beseech you to be perfectly certain that you will never be so alarmed again, nor indeed ever again set eyes on me, if it so please you. You see before you, madam, that unfortunate younger brother (for I will not omit even that title to your suspicion), who, seized with an invincible passion as he one day beheld you from your garden wall, has since run the chance of your displeasure, by coming into the house under a variety of pretences, and inasmuch as he has violated the truth has deserved it. But one truth he has not violated, which is, that never man entertained a passion sincerer; and God is my witness, madam, how foreign to my heart is that accursed love of money (I beg your pardon, but I confess it agitates me in my turn to speak of it), which other people's advances and your own modesty have naturally induced you to suspect in every person situated as I am. Forgive me, madam, for every alarm I have caused you, this last one above all. I could not deny to my love and my repentance the mingled bliss and torture of this moment; but as I am really and passionately a lover of truth as well as of yourself, this is the last trouble I shall give you, unless you are pleased to admit what I confess I have very little hopes of, which is, a respectful pressure of my suit in future. Pardon me even these words, if they displease you. You have nothing to do but to bid me-leave you; and when he quits this apartment, Harry Vernon troubles you no more."

A silence ensued for the space of a few seconds. The gentleman was very pale; so was the lady. At length she said, in a very under tone, "This surprise, sir-I was not insensible-I mean, I perceived-sure, sir, it is not Mr. Vernon, the brother of my cousin's friend, to whom I am speaking?"

"The same, madam."

"And why not at once, sir-I mean-that is to say-Forgive me, sir, if circumstances conspire to agitate me a little, and to throw me in doubt what I ought to say. I wish to say what is becoming, and to retain your respect ;" and the lady trembled as she said it.

66 My respect, madam, was never profounder than it is at this moment, even though I dare begin to hope that you will not think it dis

respectful on my part to adore you. If I might but hope, that months or years of service-"

"Be seated, sir, I beg; I am very forgetful. I am an orphan, Mr. Vernon, and you must make allowances as a gentleman" (here her voice became a little louder) " for anything in which I may seem to forget, either what is due to you or to myself."

The gentleman had not taken a chair, but at the end of this speech he approached the lady, and led her to her own seat with an air full of

reverence.

"Ah, madam," said he, "if you could but fancy you had known me these five years, you would at least give me credit for enough truth, and I hope enough tenderness and respectfulness of heart (for they all go together) to be certain of the feelings I entertain towards your sex in general; much more towards one whose nature strikes me with such a gravity of admiration at this moment, that praise even falters on my tongue. Could I dare hope that you meant to say anything more kind to me than a common expression of good wishes, I would dare to say, that the sweet truth of your nature not only warrants your doing so, but makes it a part of its humanity."

"Will you tell me, Mr. Vernon, what induced you to say so decidedly to my servant (for I heard it at the door) that you were sure I should never see you again."

"Yes, madam, I will; and nevertheless I feel all the force of your inquiry. It was the last little instinctive stratagem that love induced me to play, even when I was going to put on the whole force of my character and my love of truth! for I did indeed believe that you would discard me, though I was not so sure of it as I pretended."

"There, sir," said Pomona, colouring in all the beauty of joy and love," there is my hand. I give it to the lover of truth; but truth no less forces me to acknowledge, that my heart had not been unshaken by some former occurrences."

"Charming and adorable creature!" cried our hero, after he had recovered from the kiss which he gave her. But here we leave them to themselves. Our heroine confessed, that from what she now knew of her feelings, she must have been inclined to look with compassion on him before; but added, that she never could have been sure she loved him, much less had the courage to tell him so, till she had known him in his own candid shape.

And this, and no other, is the true story of Vertumnus and Pomona.

IX.-ON THE GRACES AND ANXIETIES

OF PIG-DRIVING.

FROM the perusal of this article we beg leave to warn off vulgar readers of all denominations, whether of the "great vulgar or the small." Warn, did we say? We drive them off; for Horace tells us that they, as well as pigs, are to be so treated. Odi profanum vulgus, says he, et arceo. But do thou lend thine ear, gentle shade of Goldsmith, who didst make thy bearleader denounce "everything as is low;" and thou, Steele, who didst humanise upon publichouses and puppet-shows; and Fielding, thou whom the great Richardson, less in that matter (and some others) than thyself, did accuse of vulgarity, because thou didst discern natural gentility in a footman, and yet was not to be taken in by the airs of Pamela and my Lady G. The title is a little startling; but "style and sentiment," as a lady said, "can do anything." Remember, then, gentle reader, that talents are not to be despised in the humblest walks of life; we will add, nor in the muddiest. The other day we happened to be among a set of spectators, who could not help stopping to admire the patience and address with which a pig-driver huddled and cherished onward his drove of unaccommodating élèves, down a street in the suburbs. He was a born genius for a manœuvre. Had he originated in a higher sphere, he would have been a general, or a stage-manager, or at least the head of a set of monks. Conflicting interests were his forte; pig-headed wills, and proceedings hopeless. To see the hand with which he did it! How hovering, yet firm; how encouraging, yet compelling; how indicative of the space on each side of him, and yet of the line before him; how general, how particular, how perfect! No barber's could quiver about a head with more lightness of apprehension; no cook's pat up and proportion the side of a pasty with a more final eye. The whales, quoth old Chapman, speaking of Neptune,

The whales exulted under him, and knew their mighty king. The pigs did not exult, but they knew their king. Unwilling was their subjection, but more in sorrow than in anger." They were too far gone for rage. Their case was hopeless. They did not see why they should proceed, but they felt themselves bound to do so; forced, conglomerated, crowded onwards, irresistibly impelled by fate and Jenkins. Often would they have bolted under any other master. They squeaked and grunted as in ordinary; they sidled, they shuffled, they half stopped; they turned an eye to all the little outlets of escape; but in vain. There they stuck (for their very progress was a sort of sticking), charmed into the centre of his sphere of action, laying their heads together, but to no

purpose; looking all as if they were shrugging their shoulders, and eschewing the tip-end of the whip of office. Much eye had they to their left leg; shrewd backward glances; not a little anticipative squeak, and sudden rush of avoidance. It was a superfluous clutter, and they felt it; but a pig finds it more difficult than any other animal to accommodate himself to circumstances. Being out of his pale, he is in the highest state of wonderment, and inaptitude. He is sluggish, obstinate, opinionate, not very social; has no desire of seeing foreign parts. Think of him in a multitude, forced to travel, and wondering what the devil it is that drives him! Judge by this of the talents of his driver.

We beheld a man once, an inferior genius, inducting a pig into the other end of Longlane, Smithfield. He had got him thus far towards the market. It was much. His air announced success in nine parts out of ten, and hope for the remainder. It had been a happy morning's work; he had only to look for the termination of it; and he looked (as a eritic of an exalted turn of mind would say) in brightness and in joy. Then would he go to the public-house, and indulge in porter and a pleasing security. Perhaps he would not say much at first, being oppressed with the greatness of his success; but by degrees, especially if interrogated, he would open, like Æneas, into all the circumstances of his journey and the perils that beset him. Profound would be his set out; full of tremor his middle course; high and skilful his progress; glorious, though with a quickened pulse, his triumphant entry Delicate had been his situation in Duckingpond row; masterly his turn at Bell-alley. We saw him with the radiance of some such

thought on his countenance. He was just entering Long-lane. A gravity came upon him, as he steered his touchy convoy into this his last thoroughfare. A dog moved him into a little agitation, darting along; but he resumed his course, not without a happy trepidation, hovering as he was on the borders of triumph. The pig still required care. It was evidently a pig with all the peculiar turn of mind of his species; a fellow that would not move faster than he could help; irritable; retrospective; picking objections, and prone to boggle; a chap with a tendency to take every path but the proper one, and with a sidelong tact for the alleys.

He bolts!

He's off!-Evasit! erupit!

"Oh, Ch-st?" exclaimed the man, dashing his hand against his head, lifting his knee in an agony, and screaming with all the weight of a prophecy which the spectators felt to be too true-" He'll go up all manner of streets!"

Poor fellow! we think of him now sometimes, driving up Duke-street, and not to be comforted in Barbican.

X.-PANTOMIMES.

HE that says he does not like a pantomime, either says what he does not think, or is not so wise as he fancies himself. He should grow young again, and get wiser. "The child," as the poet says, "is father to the man ;" and in this instance, he has a very degenerate offspring. Yes: John Tomkins, aged 35, and not liking pantomimes, is a very unpromising little boy. Consider, Tomkins, you have still a serious regard for pudding, and are ambitious of being thought clever. Well, there is the Clown who will sympathise with you in dumplings; and not to see into the cleverness of Harlequin's quips and metamorphoses, is to want a perception, which other little boys have by nature. Not to like pantomimes, is not to like animal spirits; it is not to like motion; not to like love; not to like a jest upon dulness and formality; not to smoke one's uncle; not to like to see a thump in the face; not to laugh; not to fancy; not to like a holiday; not to know the pleasure of sitting up at Christmas; not to sympathise with one's children; not to remember that we have been children ourselves; nor that we shall grow old, and be as gouty as Pantaloon, if we are not as wise and as active as they. Not wishing to be dry on so pleasant a subject, we shall waive the learning that is in us on the origin of these popular entertainments. It will be sufficient to observe, that among the Italians, from whom we borrowed them, they consisted of a run of jokes upon the provincial peculiarities of their countrymen. Harlequin, with his giddy vivacity, was the representative of the inhabitant of one state; Pantaloon, of the imbecile carefulness of another; the clown, of the sensual, macaroni-eating Neapolitan, with his instinct for eschewing danger; and Columbine, Harlequin's mistress, was the type, not indeed of the outward woman (for the young ladies were too restrained in that matter), but of the inner girl of all the lasses in Italy, the tender fluttering heart, the little dove (colombina), ready to take flight with the first lover, and to pay off old scores with the gout and the jealousy, that had hitherto kept her in durance.

The reader has only to transfer the characters to those of his own countrymen, to have a lively sense of the effect which these national pictures must have had in Italy. Imagine Harlequin a gallant adventurer from some particular part of the land, full of life and fancy, sticking at no obstacles, leaping gates and windows, hitting off a satire at every turn, and converting the very scrapes he gets in, to matters of jest and triumph. The old gentleman that pursues him, is a miser from some manufacturing town, whose ward he has run away with. The Clown is a London cockney, with a prodigious eye to his own comfort and muffins, a Lord Mayor's fool, who loved "every

thing that was good;" and Columbine is the boarding-school girl, ripe for running away with, and making a dance of it all the way from Chelsea to Gretna Green.

Pantomime is the only upholder of comedy, when there is nothing else to show for it. It is the satirist, or caricaturist of the times, ridiculing the rise and fall of hats and funds, the growth of aldermen or of bonnets, the pretences of quackery; and watching innovations of all sorts, lest change be too hasty. But this view of it is for the older boys. For us, who, upon the strength of our sympathy, boast of being among the young ones, its life, its motion, its animal spirits, are the thing. We sit among the shining faces on all sides of us, and fancy ourselves at this moment enjoying it. What whim! what fancy! what eternal movement! The performers are like the blood in one's veins, never still; and the music runs with equal vivacity through the whole spectacle, like the pattern of a watered ribbon.

In comes Harlequin, demi-masked, partycoloured, nimble-toed, lithe, agile; bending himself now this way, now that; bridling up like a pigeon; tipping out his toe like a dancer; then taking a fantastic skip; then standing ready at all points, and at right angles with his omnipotent lath-sword, the emblem of the converting power of fancy and light-heartedness. Giddy as we think him, he is resolved to show us that his head can bear more giddiness than we fancy; and lo! beginning with it by degrees, he whirls it round into a very spin, with no more remorse than if it were a button. Then he draws his sword, slaps his enemy, who has just come upon him, into a settee; and springing upon him, dashes through the window like a swallow. Let us hope that Columbine and the high road are on the other side, and that he is already a mile on the road to Gretna: for

Here comes Pantaloon, with his stupid servant; not the Clown, but a proper grave blockhead, to keep him in heart with himself. What a hobbling old rascal it is! How void of any handsome infirmity! His very gout is owing to his having lived upon twopence farthing. Not finding Harlequin and Columbine, he sends his servant to look in the further part of the house, while he hobbles back to see what has become of that lazy fellow the Clown.

He, the cunning rogue, who has been watching mid-way, and now sees the coast clear, enters in front, — round-faced, goggle-eyed, knock-kneed, but agile to a degree of the dislocated, with a great smear for his mouth, and a cap on his head, half fool's and half cook's. Commend him to the dinner that he sees on table, and that was laid for Harlequin and his mistress. Merry be their hearts: there is a time for all things; and while they dance through a dozen inns to their hearts' content, he will eat a Sussex dumpling or so. Down

them but blows," which never do. But whence come the faults of children? and how were they suffered to grow to such a height? Really,―setting aside these monsters of unpaternity,-parents are apt to demand a great many virtues in their children, which they do not themselves possess. The child, on the mere strength of their will, and without any of their experience, is expected to have good sense, good temper, and Heaven knows how many other good qualities; while the parents | perhaps, notwithstanding all the lessons they have received from time and trouble, have little or nothing of any of them. Above all, they forget that, in originating the bodies of their children, they originate their minds and temperaments; that a child is but a continuation of his father and mother, or their fathers and mothers, and kindred; that it is further modified and made what it is by education and bringing up; and that on all these accounts the parents have no excuse for abusing and tormenting it; unless with equal wisdom and a glorious impartiality they should abuse and torment themselves in like manner, scourge their own flesh, and condemn themselves to a crust and a black hole. If a father were to give his own sore legs a good flogging for inheriting ill-humours from his ancestors, he might with some show of reason proceed to punish the continuation of them in those of his child. If a cruel mother got into a handsome tub of cold water of a winter morning, and edified the neighbours with the just and retributive shrieks which she thence poured forth for a couple of hours, crying out to her deceased "mammy" that she would be a good elderly woman in future, and not a scold and a reprobate, then she might like a proper mad woman (for she is but an improper one now) put her child into the tub after her, and make it shriek out "mammy" in its turn.

But let us do justice to all one's fellowcreatures, not forgetting these very "aggravating" parents. To regard them as something infernal, and forget that they, as well as their children, have become what they are from circumstances over which they had no control, is to fall into their own error, and forget our common humanity. We believe that the very worst of these domestic tyrants (and it is an awful lesson for the best of them) would have been shocked in early life, if they could have been shown,in a magic glass, what sort of beings they would become. Suppose one of them a young man, blooming with health, and not illnatured, but subject to fits of sulkiness or passion, and not very wise; and suppose that in this glass he sees an old ill-looking fellow, scowling, violent, outrageous, tormenting with a bloody scourge his own child, who is meagre, squalid, and half-starved,-" Good God!" he would 66 cry, can that be myself? Can that be my arm, and my face? And that my own poor

little child? There are devils then, and I am doomed to be one of them." And the tears would pour into his eyes. No: not so, poor wretch thou art no devil,-there is no such thing as devilishness or pure malice for its own sake; the very cruellest actions are committed to relieve the cravings of the perpetrator's want of excitement, more than to hurt another. But though no devil, you are very ignorant, and are not aware of your ignorance. The energies of the universe, being on a great scale, are liable, in their progress from worse to better, to great roughness in the working, and appalling sounds of discord. The wiser you become, the more you diminish this jarring, and tend to produce that amelioration. Learn this, and be neither appalled nor appalling; or if your reflections do not travel so far, and you are in no danger of continuing your evil course by the subtle desperations of superstition, be content to know, that nobody ill-treats another, who is satisfied with his own conduct. If the case were otherwise, it would be worse; for you would not have the excuse, even of a necessity for relieving your own sensations. But it never is so, sophisticate about it as you may. The very pains you take to reconcile yourself to yourself, may show you how much need you have of doing so. It is nothing else which makes the silliest little child sulky; and the same folly makes the grown man a tyrant. When you begin to ill-treat your child, you begin to punish in him your own faults; and you most likely do nothing but beat them in upon him with every stroke of the scourge: for why should he be wiser than you? Why should he be able to throw off the ill-humours of which your greater energies cannot get rid ?

These thoughts we address to those who are worthy of them; and who, not being tyrants, may yet become such, for want of reflection. Vulgar offenders can be mended only with the whole progress of society, and the advancement of education. There is one thing we must not omit to say, which is, that the best parents are apt to expect too much of their children, and to forget how much error they may have committed in the course of bringing them up. Nobody is in fault, in a criminal sense. Children have their excuses, and parents have their excuses; but the wiser any of us become, the less we exact from others, and the more we do to deserve their regard. The great art of being a good parent consists in setting a good example, and in maintaining that union of dispassionate firmness with habitual good-humour, which a child never thinks of treating with disrespect.

We have here been speaking principally of the behaviour of parents to little children. When violent disputes take place between parents and children grown up,-young men and women, there are generally great faults on