How comfortable a house appears, viewed from the window of a stagecoach during a long journey! The mere circumstance of its having no other motion than that which is given to it in common with the terrestrial globe, is sufficient to constitute it a paradise. A dwelling that we should be ashamed of being seen approaching at any other time, is our envy and admiration from this cage of torture. The veriest pepper-box that ever took the bold name of" Mount Prospect," on the strength of an elevated garden-bed, and a view of the mail-coach road on days when the dust is not flying, appears to our eyes, as we whirl past it, a Borromean palace, and we heave a sigh, impregnated with the fumes of damp straw, as we admit the impossibility of our being transported to its retired and romantic retreat.

Need I explain this? Need I tell what I suffer in a coach? My long nervous legs aching continually, and, besides, twitching convulsively every few moments, till I almost lose the guidance of reason, and feel alarmingly inclined to dash my knuckles into the face of the wretch opposite to me, who snores with horrid tranquillity under a red night cap, wholly unconcerned at my agonies-my eyes smarting with dust and fatigue, and offended, besides, at every stage with the apparitions of the coachman and guard, the one with his scarlet coat and face, looking as if he would burn the box as soon as he mounted, and the other the picture of unconcern, vulgarity, and good humour, all daggers to my soul in my present situation dreading, too, lest anything should occur to stop the vehicle even for an instant, from my experience of the sensations which overwhelm me at such a moment-a bewildering continuation of the motion-a supernatural feeling of enlargement all over, as though every limb were swelling

HORACE.

beyond the usual dimensions of humanity-a tingling sensitiveness at every pore-all this, most resembling, as I should think, the hideous daydream of an opium eater, naturally causes me to dread the slightest alteration in that state of things which has, by its continuance, brought about in me a sort of morbid reconciliation with torture. The bed of Procrustes cannot have been half as complicated a piece of infernal mechanism as a modern stage coach to a nervous author of six feet high. A cage prison of Louis XI-one of his fillettes, as they were jocularly termed-comes nearest to it in size and structure; but then, luckily for his prisoners, the arch-fiend never put it into that monarch's head to place the dungeon upon wheels, and, consequently, the Cardinal Balue could have had no idea of the sufferings of an "inside passenger" at the present day. I had been travelling all night in the dark of last moon, when a cold damp easterly air was working its heavy way across the country, shedding its freight of coughs and catarrhs over the habitations of men, and shutting up coach windows upon suffocating travellers like myself. Our journey lay in the direction of the metropolis, from west to east, and, consequently, right in the teeth of the blast. Our inside passengers were, including myself, three in number, until about the middle of the night, when the door was opened, and a man, apparently of large stature, was admitted, and succeeded in getting into his place opposite me with some difficulty-at least, so I conjectured, for it was quite dark. My two previous companions, a man and a woman from the silent north, soon gave notice audibly enough that they had resumed their slumbers, and our new arrival spoke not, probably from the fear of awakening them.

I never sleep in a coach. If I do, consciousness is at my ear all the while, and tells me that I still am suffering. Now, however, I was wide awake; and my bursting head, incapable of being directed in a train of thought, began, after some time, to busy itself in spite of me in conjecturing the face that filled the black void opposite me--that, I mean, of the latest arrival among us. The idea that there is an unexplored human countenance within three feet of one, is certainly a great spur to imagination. There it is-mild, meagre, and melancholy, or rosy, rubicund, and rollicking; long and sallow, or short and shrivelled; hideous with deformity, or glorious with beauty; grinning towards you with curiosity corresponding with your own, or thrown back with philosophical dignity: whatever it be, or whether it be remote from all these or not, there it is, undiscovered as futurity-real as fate. The mind is forced into conjecture-a thousand wild ideas spring up into it, and push each other forward, until the whole brain is crowded with extraordinary and incongruous combinations. Victor Hugo describes a piece of grotesque sculpture as a petrified nightmare. I wish I could realize-petrify-immortalize, if you will-upon paper, some of the nightmare apparitions that haunted my head then, for they would astound even that phantom-loving novelist himself by their variety and uncouthness. As fancy began to weave for imagination the garb of reality, I thought I could distinguish something through the gloom. The head came out upon the dark ground. There was nothing remarkable about it at first. I discerned the grand outline of a thin, pensive physiognomy, with large dark eyes, a long nose, and a wide thinlipped mouth, rather curled downward at the corners, as in grief or suffering. The features were large, no doubt, but what of that? I had seen many large faces in my day, and always preferred the fault being on this side. Still the features were large, very large; and I could not help experiencing a curdling of my blood as their dimensions seemed to grow every moment on me. I knew not whether the face was approaching me or not, but they grew larger. I saw, and did not much

I

like this unaccountable expansion. As I continued to look, with a view to getting rid of my apprehensions, the mouth suddenly rose at the corners, and took a curl upwards, exactly corresponding to that which it had previously had in a downward position. This was again unaccountable. could not reconcile the ludicrous twist up with the mournful expression of the eyes; and, besides, the conformation of the whole face seemed to argue the physical impossibility of the feature arranging itself in that direction. But my surprise was soon to be given a fresh direction. Up went the nose with a twitch, and down went one eyebrow against it, till the hairs nearly mingled with its point, and both began to twitch and twirl like a hog's snout, as if the hideous metamorphosis were affected by some comical idea, and indulged itself in unnatural cachinnation. This was alarming. Presently the image began to wax fainter, as if it drew behind the curtain of night again. Again it came forward, like a character dressed in a new mask to keep up the shadowy drama. This scene represented an old, drivelling physiognomy, with blabber lip and bleared eye, the seventh age of Shakspeare, sans everything" that could denote mental or bodily power. The poor old creature was palsied all over, and the head fell about with the coach, as if it had lost all power over itself, and was merely held on by the neck, instead of being held up. This was more horrible than the last, and I dreaded the instant death of my fellowtraveller. Long time did I gaze fearfully on his impotence, and then either he receded into darkness, like the preceding vision, or I closed my eyes. When I looked again, I could scarcely believe them. The face this time was very faint, but I could discern its colour,-a hue, in comparison with which the paleness of a corpse is the flush of health. It was white,-not flesh-white-not the lily hue of the most alabaster beauty of our unsunned north-but absolutely, literally, white— white like the freshly cut statue-white like the new-made shroud! Nor was this all if ever I had eyes I could see then-the features were defectivemysteriously defective! There was a wide interminable fissure of a mouth

a small unmeaning nose, it is true, but above them!—Polyphemus was frightful, we are told, and we can believe the tale; but at that moment I could have considered his contour of features divine! The lights, the ornaments, the lovely and harmonious pair that form, united, the soul of the face were wanting! not, as in the Cyclop, thrust into an extra-natural union, but wanting altogether!-as in the blind? No-not a vestige was there to prove that the Creator had ever designed the admission of a ray into that headnot a portal, even though closed from birth, for the day, the king of glory, to come in! A smooth surface, without projection or hollow, without brow or lid, ran sheer down from the forehead to the cheek, and yet a kind of sightless stare emanated from the whole head, as if the mass were lit up with microscopic vision, and an hundred minute eyes were busy upon me in undefined scrutiny. We are appalled sometimes by the glare of the unindented eye-ball of a bust; a skull eyes us as we draw towards it, each rendered more frightful by the absence of what constitutes life and nature; how much more dreadful, then, this widening of the gulph, this more inexplicable eccentricity from the laws of nature!

The eyeless visage moved up and down occasionally with a slow motion. We were travelling in a deep road, between trees, and the rumbling of the wheels on the stony causeway sounded hollow in the silence of the night. A mortal freezing came upon me-a fear, which nothing real, nothing to be accounted for, could have produced, and which the bravest has to confess he has experienced when the reason is baffled, and nature turns darkly out of her accustomed course. It is vain to say, classically, that I was astonished-that my hair stood on end-that my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. Every peasant passing a church-yard has felt the same effects produced upon him. Every human being has felt them when he has heard a sudden unaccountable noise in the middle of a dark night. I was frightened, I honestly confess; and would you, reader, clad though you may be in the trappings of war, or in the still more invulnerable ar

VOL. IV.

mour of a good conscience, would you, I say, have felt otherwise under the same circumstances?

We emerged from the hollow way and the covert of trees just as the first wave of morning broke upon the shore of the eastern horizon. A stream of light entered the coach and my mind at once; and, as all supernatural appearances are said to have an aversion to day, my spectral head fled the first glance of Aurora; and what do you suppose it left behind? Not a cloud of sulphur, not even the smell of burning, but-a white nightcap! The gentleman opposite to me was asleep, and as his head hung forward, the top of the nightcap was presented to me, the fold at the border having been the mouth of my apparition, and the tassel its nose!

We drove on, and I "registered a vow" against believing my own eyes for the future, at least in the dark. Morning was lost in day, and as we approached the metropolis, we seemed to fly rather than travel, the road being smooth, the horses high-bred, and my companion-the eyeless apparition, he of the white nightcap-being so charming, so fascinating in his conversation, that the stages and hours flew past as if on wings.

Man began at length visibly to intrude upon nature, and oust her from her solitary domain more apparently at every mile. As we approached the citadel of population, her outworks became visible, trenching, and squaring, and dividing, with numerous intersections, what had been originally green, and sweeping, and open.

"I never can approach a great town," said the exorcised spectre, as these symptoms became every moment more manifest, "without feeling my mind cramped, and squeezed, and clipped out of its natural freedom, like one of these pieces of vegetable masonry midway between wall and hawthorn, that skirt the road as we pass,

and take the name of hedges." "I presume you are a dweller in the fields by choice as well as fortune," said I, casting a glance at his sunburnt features.

I have not described his appearance. He was a large, plainly dressed man, with some degree of rusticity about his garb, or rather his manner of wear

C

ing it, which would shock to the very soul that tribe of beings which continually throng our streets, and obtrude themselves upon us from the simple circumstance of those streets being their world. His physiognomy was not particularly interesting. It was healthy and heavy looking, sunburnt and sedate; a northern height of cheek bone seemed to intrude upon and squeeze upwards the lower eyelid, so as to give to the eye, small and piercing in itself, somewhat of a comical expression, that ill accorded with the rest of the features. The traveller's age was past the middle sands of life, as was attested by the colour and paucity of his hairs.

"For some time I have been by choice a dweller in the plain," said he, "though the city was my home as long as I was not able to follow the bent of my own inclination. That always led me into the country, and caused my imagination to work me a fairy landscape, even in the most smoky three-pair of a smoky metropolis. My mind was constantly out of town, in fact, and hence my friends used sometimes to tell me that I was an absent man."

"One can understand the country as well as admire it, without being familiar with it," I observed.

"Yes; but it is not so much for country scenes that one sighs in a town; it is for that originality of character, which has space to develop itself only where man is not crushed against man, as in cities. The ash and the oak, while they stand close in the crowd of the unthinned plantation, spring alike, and without variety, in one long unmeaning shoot from the earth to the general struggle for light on high. It is in the wide and breezeswept meadow that the characteristic gracefulness of the one, and the strength of the other are developed to the eye in happy contrast."

"But may it not happen, on the other hand, that the collision of intellect, or, at least, the intercourse of life, as it certainly excites feeling, speculation, and opinion, shall hence strike out new varieties of character by a sort of grafting operation ?”

"No doubt there may be varieties produced, but the very term implies the absence of originality. This gene

rates and grows alone; it is injured by approximating to any thing differing from itself. The moment it feels that it is singular, it begins to lose its essence; and for this reason I retire to the most unfrequented nooks to look for the broad lines that constitute character."

"And yet the great subjects of delineation,” said I, “are taken in crowds. The sketches and portraits that most interest us, are those whose originals have been found in the court, the camp, or the mart."

"True; but where has the science that lent to the artist his master-touch been acquired? Not in the hollow formalities or the busy clamour of mixed life; but where the passions and the feelings that stir alike in all have been more naturally and strikingly developed, away in the remote dwellings of rusticity, the mine where all those gems are found in the rough, which are afterwards merely given an uninteresting resemblance of form by attrition.- -But what have we here? Oh, I fancy I remember it-the gate, I believe, to the Military-road."

We were now, in fact, in sight of Dublin.

Dublin! How much of my world is contained beneath thy smoky mantle! The metropolis-the pride of my country! the home of my manhood! the theatre on which the drama of my life has been hitherto acted, and where its final scene is probably destined to close! Ancient, vast, noble, yet miserable city! how hast thou been wounded by those who would be held thine own familiar friends! yet have thy shoots been strong and magnificent in spite of them all, and thou hast grasped the country year after year within thy circuit, and still art silently drawing in field after field in thy stony embrace, and even thrusting thy giant shoulders, like the Baian walls of old, forth into the primeval depths of ocean! Shrine of superstition, yet altar of much holiness! unknown to thousands who talk of thee, and would crush thee down to the iron standard of their own ignorance! Huge, neglected diadem of the West! thou art worthy of more than thy rulers have done for thee, and more, far more, than thy self-called friends have designed for thee!

The setting of this great jewel is

worthy of the now triple crown, and the royal head that bears it. A long, sunny slope from the north sinks into a deep blue bay, and rises again in great masses of granite, which at length swell up into the mountains of Dublin and Wicklow. In the recess, where this bay contracts into a river, was the plain destined to bear the proud weight of the capital of Erin. There it has risen with its hundred palaces of its own primary rock, and has spread itself away north and south, and east and west, up the river, and along the margin of the bay, and out to the mountain foot, till the construction of Art has filled the whole stretch of Nature's amphitheatre.

Ascend yon pillar, and look with Nelson over the scene.

At first the eye is bewildered, and nothing is discernible but a vast "crystallization" of roofs, stretching away beneath on every side into mist. Presently some features come out, and you become aware that you are fixed in the line of a long, open plain, which from its dimensions you can hardly believe to be a street, so vast appears its breadth, and so interminable its length. Innumerable spots are moving backwards and forwards along its length, which, from your height, more resemble ants in one of their beaten paths, than human beings-yet such they are. They are the busy population of the north and south divisions of the town changing sides, whether for business or pleasure, and meeting beneath your feet in the great thoroughfare of Sackvillestreet. Immediately under you this street appears flanked on its western side by a great building, of which you can but discern the general plan, and a row of colossal pillars, foreshortened, as you overlook them, into the appearance of balustrades. From within its spacious court the noise of wheels ascends, and you observe men and carriages passing swiftly into and out of it. This is our Post-office, the heart, as it may be justly termed, of Ireland, whence the stream of intelligence and information is thrown, as by a daily throb, to its remotest extremities, and to which it returns again, to be again poured forth in continual pulses. The great street in this view may be considered the aorta, and the thou

sand channels you see as you look around, the arteries and veins of the great body.

Raise your eyes, and stretch them further over this great architectural sea, that looks, as does the mer de glace, to have been petrified as it was raging under the influence of a whirlwind-the illusion, too, taking strength from the long line of masts that rise at no great distance, stretching past a lofty dome that may be imagined a gigantic light-house. Various objects rise like islands out of the mass; some abrupt and lofty, others scarcely raised above its surface. The line of shipping approaches the southern extremity of the great street, where it contracts into a narrower space, and marks the course of the small river that manages to insinuate itself through the encroaching piles of masonry, and at last escape, as if half ashamed, into ocean. This paltry stream, over which Sackville-street seems to stride, by Carlisle-bridge, to meet the majestic edifices of Westmorland-street beyond, however insignificant may be its appearance in the grandeur of the city, bears, like many a country gentleman under similar circumstances, a very different character and aspect while it remains in its own sphere, and continues a plain, honest mountain torrent. a few miles off the Anna Liffey pours a dark and free tide through romantic dells and dingles, and leaps from rock to rock, the lord of the ascendant-the grand feature of the landscape-impetuous-almost resistless. Here, like the transplanted rustic, it is contaminated and paltry, and mars the fair proportions of the scene.

But

Of the numerous islands beyond this bar, as I may call it, where the wave seems to break suddenly and angrily in a direction from east to west, some arrest the eye sooner than others, as more primitive in their appearance and more closely congregated together, forming a remarkable cluster in the distance. Here you have the original formation-the city, marked by her close parishes and numerously sowed public and picturesque buildings. A long ridge, running from the west, is crowned with an edifice, apparently of varying antiquity, which takes the general form of a double lagoon, or coral island, as we find them described by modern voyagers. Over its eastern extremity your eye at once rests upon