to articulate at Drury-Lane,-Stella and Leatherlungs. "Stella and Leatherlungs!"-What a combination. It's like

"There was a lady,

And she loved a swine."

They say the piece is Colman's. A dull affair, whoever may be the author. In the book way, nothing at all new -that is, nothing worth talking about in Maga. But these last two Numbers of yours, by the bye, have played the very devil in Cockaigne. Poor Hazlitt, I am told, is going about absolutely frantic; and all the ale at the Southampton Arms turned sour the moment "The General Question" came out. Tell Tickler this, if you love me.

Talking of Hazlitt, I had the strangest dream of King Leigh last night! I thought he was come over from Italy, and had taken the White Conduit House Tea Gardens. It's true, upon my word. I saw him in the bar, as plain as ever I saw him in my life-in a straw hat, and a foreign air-quite smirking and genteel-like. He was "setting down" the little loaves, and pats of butter, as they went out from the sanctum, in a bran new Fairburn's pocket-book, with a red morocco back; while the waiter boys ran about, scalding people with the hot water out of the tea-kettles. Very odd, wasn't it?-You haven't heard anything of the kind?

I did understand, certainly, some time back, that Cockaigne was rebellious, about his Majesty's stay abroad, and refused any longer to be governed as a province; but White ConduitHouse is so near Islington; and that affair of the washerwoman; it can hardly be!

Heigho!-I am very much in love, Christopher! But I know you hate these kind of affairs.

And yet, if you could but see the object!

Talking of love, I had such a batch of Lafitte last night, my dear friend! with an improved Anchovy toast; and not the ghost of a head-ache this morning. Ambrose shall have the directions for the toast immediately; though I hope to be down before your next jollification.

I stop, for a moment, to make a dozen of oysters happy.

*

They are gone-the little dears!Natives they were. So white, so plump, they put me in mind of Kitty

Stephens (bless her!) exactly. I could have eaten another dozen, if I had not been in love. There was one of the departed rather thinner than the rest; perhaps he was in love too!

There is a providence, my dear North, even in the eating of an oyster! I could moralize, when I think how different might have been the lot of that little rogue who looked leaner(I think he was in love)-than his companions. How he must hug himself where he is, reflecting where he might have been! He might have lived on, perhaps, even to old age, and never have been caught. The dredging-pole might have passed over him, year after year; leaving him to pine, and be neglected, and grow all beard, and go out of season! Or he might have been taken up by the nets, and yet afterwards dropped by accident on the beach; where he would have died deserted! slowly roasting in the sun, and with the conviction too, in his agony, that he should not be fit to eat when all was over! Or, (cruellest fate of all!) after getting safe as far as Billinsgate, fate might, as I may say, have overtaken him between the boat and the lip; he might have been bought by an itinerant dealer, instead of my respectable fishmonger; been cried about in a ricketty cart, or exposed in a tub at the corner of an alley; and, at last, his feelings, insulted with thick vinegar and black pepper, have found a horrible grave in the stomach of a coal-heaver!

But don't let Ebony say I am neglecting him; for positively there is nothing that you would listen to "extant" here. Apropos though, there is The Diorama. Did you see it in Paris? No. Well, but you have read in the newspapers (if ever by accident you take them up) about the scaffolding on the Chapel view,-and the workmen at which the French General threw stones,-and the pots, and the tools, and the broken marble,-and all that?-A good deal of it is true enough.

The workmen certainly did not deceive me; but I confess I took the planks and trowels, (they are at a distance, understand, from the figures of the men,) to be part of the preparations used in putting up the picture. And what helps the illusion a good deal, is, that the building in which you stand is actually incomplete,-full of masons

and bricklayers, and their materiel de guerre.

The landscape picture-the Valley in Switzerland-you would like, if possible, better than the first view; but it is classical (of course) to like the Chapel best; and the outline of the farm-house in front of this view is really magical. It is difficult to persuade myself, even with a knowledge of the real fact, that the house is not a distinct object, apart from the rest of the picture; and the view, generally indeed, a compound of model as well as painting. The whole beats panorama, and cosmorama, and Covent-Garden scenery to boot-clean out of the field.

Well, then ;-besides the Diorama, what is there? Why, there is MacAdam's new pavement, begun in St James's Square; but that is not to be tried in a minute. Then there are balloons, too, abounding, since the gas companies fill them by contract, but no new feature ;-I wish somebody would go up by moon-light.

And all this-balloons, and pave

ment, and Diorama and all-what is it to you, who want a discourse upon the Digamma? or to me, who have 66 a silent sorrow," and all the rest of it, you know-(what is it?) "For which joy has no balm," and something else no sting? Absolutely, I have seen nothing that has entertained me these three days, except that the apothecaries have got cabriolets, which something annoys the dandies. The Old Bailey sessions beginning yesterday was a little relief; but-very dullall petty larcenies. You will hear of my committing an atrocity myself within this day or two-just for novelty-if Sophia Amelia-(but you shan't know her name) does not relent.

Farewell! I'll send the verses, if I happen to write them. Ah, Christopher!-But I may live to catch you in love some day. -Odso! I almost forgot to ask-were you ever in London at Michaelmas? It's a fortnight now almost since; and I protest I smell roast goose still.

T.

WALTON'S Complete Angler is a delightful book, that is certain; but it cannot be so intensely delightful to Scottish as to English readers. Old Izaak was a Londoner. He not only wrote the Lives of Five English Worthies, but he lived in Fleet-Street, in the house third-west from the corner of Chancery-Lane; where he was (according to a tradition in his family) "a wholesale linen-draper, or Hamburgh merchant." Londoners, therefore, claim him as their own dear old Izaak; and even the Cockneys feel that they have an interest in the benign octogenarian. There is, perhaps, something John Gilpinish about him; and having been, beyond all doubt, London citizen, of credit and renown,” his reputation is cherished in that metropolis with a tenderness and zeal with which we inhabitants of the Modern

66

a

Athens cannot perhaps feel an adequate sympathy. Yet, we are now speaking rather for others than for ourselves. We do venerate the "old man eloquent," as truly as the very worst angler in Cockney-land; while we flatter ourselves, that we are as perfect adepts, both in theory and practice, of the delightful art in which he excelled, as any brother of the angle-Mf Major himself not excepted-between Charing-Cross and Cheapside.

There are indeed many circumstances, independent even of its intrinsic merits, that render this book singularly captivating. It was written by an old man, who, buried in the thick mists and close air of a noisy city, and occupied in pursuits that almost always, to a certain degree, narrow the range of natural feelings, and sadly benumb their elasticity, seems yet to have pre

VOL. XIV.

30

served, untainted and unfaded, the freshness of all his boyish enjoyments, and even his infant delight in the sights, and sounds, and smells-the air, the music, the flowers, and the running waters, of the country. He seems to have felt, to the last issues of protracted life, that God made the country; man the town;" and, certainly, humble, and, for the most part, artless, as his descriptions are, they impress us throughout with a conscious ness of that truth. The old citizen, on his way even to the river side, seems to forget wholly the world in which he lived; and after the first rise of a grayling, a trout, or a salmon, "the smoke has all past away from his eyes," and he steps along the meadows, through among the feeding or staring kine, with as careless a heart as Dobbin or Hobbinol -a wholesale linen-draper no more-and forgetful of Hamburgh and Holland.

This is, in fact, the charm of the "Complete Angler." We do not so much think that we are reading an old book, as that we are listening to, or walking with, an old man. That old man, without intending it, reveals to us his sweet, pure, gentle, guileless, and enlightened character. We feel that he is," in wit, a man ; simplicity, a child;" using wit in its old acceptation of wisdom ;-and we deliver ourselves up to the full possession of the spirit of the sport, when that sport is partaken with our friend and father.

But we have said, that old Izaak is more tenderly beloved in England than in Scotland. We have no immense cities in our small kingdom. Fishing streams intersect our most populous towns; and we have ourselves caught fish in the market-place of a populous village, and laid them out for display on the stone-steps leading up to the Cross, erected by the piety of our popish ancestors. Such a being as Izaak Walton could never have been in Scotland. And therefore we do not thoroughly understand either his character, or the impassioned veneration with which it is regarded. He is rather considered as a sort of oddity; and the book itself is not so much felt as the real record of the experiences of a flesh and blood old man; as a pleasant, although somewhat unnatural fiction, too often bordering upon silliness; and to a grave, philosophical people like us, throughout tinged with a childish and

Utopian spirit. Now, in all this, we are partly in the right, and partly in the wrong, as might be shewn in a few words. But we have some other prefatory remarks to make, so let the Waltonites settle it as they will.

In Scotland-and, to be sure, in many districts of England too-angling is quite a different affair from what it was in the hands of Izaak or his son Charles. It is all the best angling is

rather a wild, difficult, adventurous, and vigorous pastime. It partakes of the passion of savage life-a passion which, like that of the young poet, so beautifully described by Wordsworth, for natural scenery, "haunts" the true angler, and carries him to the river or lake side in a fever. To him the sound of the waterfall brings a thousand eager dreams-the liquid lapse of level streams decoys him away into houseless solitudes-the south or west-wind that drops the "feed" upon the pool, comes from the long mountain glen, at whose head the river has its sourceand the clouds that throw their "killing shadows" over his flies, are seen travelling over peak and precipice. Loneliness, dreariness, utter seclusion from human life, relieved by unexpected hospitality in some hut, unseen till the angler is at its very door, or by the figure of some shepherd stalking by on his own occupation-these are the characters of the Scottish angler's amusement on moor and by mountain-more or less marked; but still something very remote indeed from the scenery in which Walton delighted, and which he so vividly delineated. Much, no doubt, there is in common among all anglers; and therefore Walton can be indifferent to none; nay, must be delightful to all. But the enthusiasm, the veneration, the reverence, are to be found in England only, and especially in and about London.

Now, should these paragraphs meet the eye of some well-informed, welloccupied man, who never threw a line in his life, he will wonder what all this is that we are writing about; and haply remember Dr Johnson's definition. Friend! purchase forthwith Mr Major's edition of the Complete Angler, and the mystery will be solved.

Begin, good friend! with the plates; and you will feel yourself-unless you are indeed a hopeless thorough-paced in-grained son of Mammon, beguiled into a dim imperfect sympathy, with

the simple pleasures that seem therein shadowed forth. Behold, first of all, Walton surrounded and crowned by the Graces, and begin to ask yourself, what could be in the character of that old man, to inspire Genius so to figure his bust. Look on the little Cupids, emblematical of the theory and practice of angling-one sitting like a wiseacre at midnight by lamplight, on a high-backed elbow-chair, in a trelliced bower, with leg on knee, and poring knowingly through an eye-glass on some cunning volume, and the other marching boldly by dawning mornshine among the water-lilies, with rod and landing-net, pannier on back, and gaiters mid-way up his thighs. The artist who conceived that pretty fanciful design, was an angler. Look at these three jolly youths, Piscator, Venator, and Auceps, good fellows, well met, "and proceeding to drink their morning draught at the ThatchedHouse in Hodsden ;" and, in the graceful freedom of that angler's salutation, read a lesson of courtesy and humanity; or join that party in the meadow, below the shadow of the village church tower, and hark to pretty Maudlin, the milk-maid, singing that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow,

"Come live with me and be my love;"

while her mother replies, in the second part, “If love and all the world were young," which, she saith," indeed fits me best now, when the cares of the world begin to take hold of me." Why, from looking at the very plate, you will join in bestowing Sir Thomas Overbury's milk-maid's wish upon Maudlin" that she may die in the spring, and, being dead, may have good store of flowers stuck round about her winding-sheet." But indeed all the plates are most beautiful; and perhaps in no former edition, (although we wish not to undervalue any of them,) are they more delicately or characteristically touched than in this of Mr Major. We have likewise a well-written Life of Father Walton. The book is a charming specimen of typography, and the size apt for a side-pocket. Alas! our copy is already soiled, though only six moons old, for it has been our companion on several excursions among the

hollows of the hills;" and this, all the world knows, has been a rainy

season.

A rainy season in troth-too much so for the angler's liking. Izaak, with his ground-fishing, could, no doubt, have filled his pannier one day in the week, on an average of the season. But we, like Charles Cotton, (whom perhaps in too many things we resemble) confine our practice chiefly to the fly. For that we need make no apology; for, after all, fly-fishing alone deserves the name of angling. From March till this, the 15th of October, scarcely has there been one mild, soft, genial, shadowy day, with now and then a moist hour intermingled with the breezy dry, for our silent solitary trade. We caught the transitory curl as it crept along our own merry rivulet, and took it before the sudden plump of rain discoloured its limpid darkness. Several times we did so, and on a never-to-be-forgotten Wednesday, we struck the monarch of the flood." Many a time and oft have we felt our hook slip from his jaw, just as we had laid him on the shelving gravel isle, with his silver side so beautifully spotted, shining in the moonlight just then breaking through a cloud. But on that Wednesday we had hooked him by the tongue; and there at last he lay, our own, in spite of all the Naiads. Four pound weight, Mr Major, twenty-two ounces to the pound, as brilliant a trout as ever glittered on the banks of Dove. A nobler never lay on the cold slab within that little dome, (not yet utterly decayed,) "Piscatoribus sacrum," where Charles, albeit wild and petulant, listened, well-pleased and reverently, to his father Izaak, or sung to the good old man

"Oh! how happy here's our leisure !
Oh! how innocent our pleasure!
Oh! ye valleys! oh, ye mountains!
Oh! ye groves and crystal fountains!
Now I rove at liberty,
By turns, to come and visit ye!"

Gentle reader, whoe'er thou art, angler, or ignorant of the river's joy, wilt thou while away a leisure hour over the "Conference?" Whether wouldst thou choose air, earth, or water, for the element of thy recreation? Here, in this "Conference," is that weighty matter debated, and hear how courteously Piscator yields precedence in the debate to his hunting and hawking brethren

"But, Gentlemen, though I be able to

do this, I am not so unmannerly as to engross all the discourse to myself; and therefore, you two having declared yourselves, the one to be a lover of hawks, the other of hounds, I shall be most glad to hear what you can say in the commendation of that recreation which each of you love and practise; and having heard what you can say, I shall be glad to exercise your attention with what I can say concerning my own recreation and Art of Angling, and by this means, we shall make the way to seem the shorter and if you like my motion, I would have Mr Falconer to begin.

Auceps consents to the motion with all his heart. Is not this spirited?

"And first, for the element I used to trade in, which is the Air, an element of more worth than weight, an element that doubtless exceeds both the earth and water; for though I sometimes deal in both, yet the air is most properly mine. I and my Hawks use that, and it yields us most recreation; it stops not the high soaring of my noble generous Falcon; in it she ascends to such an height, as the dull eyes of beasts and fish are not able to reach to ; their bodies are too gross for such high ele vations in the air my troops of Hawks soar upon high, and when they are lost in the sight of men, then they attend upon and converse with the Gods; therefore I think my Eagle is so justly stiled Jove's servant in ordinary and that very Falcon, that I am now going to see, deserves no meaner a title, for she usually in her flight endangers herself, like the son of Dædalus, to have her wings scorched by the sun's heat, she flies so near it, but her mettle makes her careless of danger; for she then heeds nothing, but makes her nimble pinions cut the fluid air, and so makes her highway

over the steepest mountains, and deepest

rivers, and in her glorious career looks with contempt upon those high steeples and magnificent palaces which we adore and wonder at; from which height I can make her to descend by a word from my mouth (which she both knows and obeys) to accept of meat from my hand, to own me for her Master, to go home with me, and be willing the next day to afford me the like recreation."

Auceps then, for a little while, digresses from his hawks, and speaks of the other denizens of air. No wonder this book is a favourite with Words

worth, for is not this a pretty prose lyrical ballad?

"Nay more, the very birds of the air, those that be not Hawks, are both so many and so useful and pleasant to mankind, that I must not let them pass without some observations: they both feed and refresh him; feed him with their choice bodies, and refresh him with their heavenly voices. I will not undertake to mention the several

kinds of fowl by which this is done; and his curious palate pleased by day, and which with their very excrements afford him a soft lodging at night. These I will pass by, but not those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.

"As first the Lark, when she means to rejoice; to cheer herself and those that hear her, she then quits the earth, and sings as she ascends higher into the air, and having ended her heavenly employment, grows then mute and sad to think she must descend to the dull earth, which she would not touch but for necessity.

"How do the Black-bird and Thrassel with their melodious voices bid welcome to the cheerful Spring, and in their fixed months warble forth such ditties as no art or instrument can reach to ?

"Nay, the smaller birds also do the like in their particular seasons, as namely the Leverock, the Titlark, the little Linnet, and the honest Robin, that loves mankind both alive and dead.

"But the Nightingale, another of my airy creatures, breathes such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased. He that at midnight, when the very labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have very often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say; Lord, what music hast thou provided for the saints in Heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music on Earth!"

He then returns to his hawks, which he says are usually distinguished into short-winged hawk," mentioning the two kinds," the long-winged and the varieties" chiefly in use amongst us in this nation." But Izaak probably knew not much about hawking, and, besides, Piscator is to be the chief interlocutor.

Neither do we know much about hawking, but we have seen the pastime. It was long-long ago-some boyish days. The scene was a wide twenty years, and upwards, in our moor, just beginning to be enclosed, so that there were here and there in the wild, patches of barley, oats, and potato-ground, the birth-place and the haunt of many partridges. When it was rumoured through the parish that Lord Eglinton's hooded hawks, with bells, and lures, and setters, and gamekeepers, were to be that day on the Moor of Eaglesham, how we burst from the school-house at the playhour, crossed the Bridge of Humby