thirty-six rooms, and now the residence of Mrs. C. and her pretty squirrel-mouthed children. On the opposite shore the various picturesque coves, white villas, rich meadows, the church and village of Bowness, its pine-enveloped parsonage, and a wooded promontory that runs into the lake, friendlily to land the passengers from the ferry-boat, set at naught all power of description. We landed at Bowness, where my honest friend, John Ullock, landlord of the White Lion, with a countenance so open, so exactly indicating a laker, that I anticipated truly the civility and attention I afterwards experienced. Fortunately, no company was then there, and I ran up a flight of steps into the garden, over the little bowling-green, and took possession of a summer-house that looked down upon the matchless lake, the great island, the Hy-Staff island, and the two Lilly-of-the-Valley islands, where these lovely flowers bespread the surface as thickly as grass. Here the tea-tray was immediately brought, and I enjoyed the viands, with positive happiness. The worthy rector, Mr. Barton's, arrival, broke my reverie of bliss, and I learned that as he was rather an invalid, my assistance on the Sunday would be a kindness. Saturday 26th, the whole of the morning was spent upon the water, fishing (Sam's rod, for perch), and sailing down to Rawlinson's Nab: the length of this king of the lakes, is thirteen miles. An agreeable party now were arrived at the inn, and after dinner we again launched forth, and landed at Belle-vue, Mr. Curwen's island of forty-one acres, and from every side of it we enjoy exquisite views of Windermere, with its variegated shores. So high was the wind, that the placid lake became a stormy sea. Sunday 27th, walking forth to church, a mitred carriage passed me, and I instantly recollected, divinity's lion, Dr. Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. In stature, in look, and in gesture, no less than in mind, is he the greatest of men. He is amongst men, what Skiddaw is amongst mountains. A bevy of ladies followed this Leviathan into church; but seeing me and Barton approaching, he stopt at the door, and with the dignity and air of the royal Dane's spectre, he turned to make a very graceful bow. While I was surplicing, Barton went to the pew and informed him of my name &c. in an instant he returned and told me that his lordship gave no answer to this, and as he frightens them out of their senses, he came immediately from

him.

En

Little did I regard this apparent pride; but no sooner was the service ended, than forth from his pew stalked this mighty lord; complacency upon his brow, and paternal affection in his eye; took me by the hand, and insisted that I should accompany him to Calgarth, or if I stayed at Bowness, that I would visit him as frequently as I could. gaged to dinner at the rectory, and obliged to depart the next morning, I could only lament my inability to accept so condescending and flattering an invitation. "Come then," said his lordship, in a tone of softened thunder, "we will compromise this matter-I will lend you to Barton during dinner, provided he will let me have you early in the afternoon." This was settled, and I walked four miles to Calgarth, lingering to behold glimpses of the lake on my left hand, and a torrent roaring at the base of a wooded dell, on my right. The wine was yet on the table, I was received with ineffable kindness, introduced to Monsieur D'Ormond, the bosom friend of Louis XVI., Sir John St. Ledger, and the two Sunderlands of Ullverston: so much information, sweetened by such urbanity of manners, so much attention to each guest, particularly to me, I never enjoyed or witnessed at any table. Mrs. Watson shone no less in the drawing room, and they both seemed to regret that I could not spend Monday with them, as Mr. Watson the eldest son, now in the army, then became of age. Early on Monday morn, September 28th, I ascended the heights above Windermere, and did not imitate Mrs. Lot till I reached the mountain's brow. Well was I rewarded:-the entire lake was distended, with all its angles and promontories, bays and islands, at my feet. On my left appeared Lancaster Sands, bounded by the ocean; to the right, mountains of all sizes and variations-terrible, sublime, wooded, and cultivated, and in the "path of beauty," variegated inclosures, hanging to the eye in every sweet and picturesque form.

Now downward as I bend my sight,
What is that atom I espy?
Is that a man?
And hath that little speck its cares,
Its freaks, its follies, and its airs?

And do I hear the insect say,
"My lakes, my mountains, my domain?"
O weak, contemptible and vain-
The tenant of a day!

"Were you to receive a picture something like this celebrated water, Claude

must throw his delicate sun-shine over the cultivated vales, the scattered cots, the groves, the lakes, and the woods; Salvator must dash out the horror of the impending cliffs, the steeps, the hanging woods, the foaming water-falls; while the grand pencil of Poussin should crown this unattainable chef-d'ouvre of perfection with the solitary, tyrannic majesty of the beetling mountains.

"Write fully to Liverpool, on Sunday morning, at Mrs. S-'s, 44, Duke street. Most truly yours, H. WHITE."

GREGORY HIPKINS, ESQ.

SURNAMED THE UNLUCKY.

(Concluded from p. 14).

Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, saw my specimen, and forthwith I became a reporter. I did not succeed quite so well with Pitt. The impression produced by one of his speeches on my mind was that of a pageant, or a procession of beautiful figures, like those which embellish the friezes of an ancient temple. Every word, by a miraculous collocation, found its place-yet, as a whole, it was too uniform and finished, and with too few under parts, to sink deeply into the memory, which requires frequent contrasts to aid it. In a word, Pitt was the perfect rhetorician; whilst Fox, like an athlete, threw aside the ornaments of rhetoric as so many encumbrances to the muscular play of his limbs. It was this circumstance that diminished the value of my services as a reporter. There was another. I could make no hand of the second and third rate speakers. If I abridged them, they complained of being mutilated. If I served them up in their own unadulterated nonsense in its primitive state, they vowed they were misrepresented. It chanced, that in the ordinary routine of duty, I had to report the speech of a member whom I could not well bear, and who was supporting a certain job with all his might and main. Finding the effort to follow him painful in the extreme. I asked a person who sat next to me, if he had collected the substance of what he had said. My informant, as I afterwards learned, was adverse to the job,-and, unfortunately, so impregnated with the arguments against it, that he began instantly to state them one after another. I took it for granted they were those of the inaudible member, whom he perhaps might have heard more distinctly than I could, from having the advantage of quicker

error.

organs; and with this impression, hastened with my report to the office. The next morning, the orator figured as a powerful opponent of the job he had supported through thick and thin. I was obliged, therefore, to resign my post. Such was the sinister result of a mere casual proximity to the officious gentleman, who so kindly led me into the And now, the demon of contiguity seemed disposed to assist me in repairing the ills he had done me. At a friend's house, I was seated next to his daughter, who was likely, on the expected demise of a relative, to be possessed of a tolerable fortune. I met her at the same table frequently, each time contriving to sit next to her. She was what people call sensible; that is, she spoke common things on common subjects;-nor did I like her the worse for not being crammed with reading. assiduities pleased her, and we were married.

My

No mortal man could feel more sensitively the transition to a married state, than Gregory Hipkins the Unlucky. It was a change, physical and moral, of the entire man-a new idiosyncracy, as it were, kneaded into his own. It brought new connexions, new habitudes fathers-in-law-brothers-in-law-mothers-in-law. It was like a change of tribe to an Israelite. I could only see, or think, or feel, as they did-enter into their squabbles on one side or another, for neutrality is an indulgence seldom permitted. As I said, my wife's property was only an expectancy-but so little likely to be defeated, that my father-in-law gave us, in the interim, a scanty stipend to live on. Expectation is a fine glittering thing, but a most sorry purveyor for immediate wants. was in reality a pensioner upon my wife's caprices; of which, to say the truth, she had no scanty assortment.

I

It was to

I had my cure, however. get into the good books of the uncle, whose will was in a short time to be the cornucopia to render us easy and affluent. We spent much of our time at his villa, near London. He was a LieutenantColonel in the India service, and a bachelor; and having scraped together a few lacs of rupees, he had returned with a sallow complexion, and the reduced portion of liver usually brought back to England by old Indians. It was in truth an easy commerce we had to carry on: on our part, to hear his military adventures, surpassing every

thing the world of fiction or reality had heretofore yielded,-on his, to recount them from morn till night. A miles gloriosus of this description would have been a treasure to Plautus or Ben Jonson. He stood nine hours up to the neck in water at the first breach in Seringapatam-looked tigers full in the face, while he sketched their likenesses -crossed the Ganges with bullocks and baggage, over a bridge formed by the backs of sleeping alligators-slept in cots with cobra di capellos coiled upon his pillow, while scorpions dropt into his mouth when he gave his first yawn in the morning- and, on one occasion, having accidentally met with a fall, during the procession of Juggernaut, lay stretched at full length, whilst the chariot followed by myriads of worshippers went over him. In short, it became a penance beyond my powers of endurance, to live on terms of ordinary complaisance with a liar of such magnitude. As often, however, as I was about to utter an incredulous expression, the conjugal frown of Mrs. Hipkins rebuked me to silence; and sometimes a pinch of the arm, with a "Can't you be quiet, Gregory?" was requisite to keep me quiet.

And thus things went on, till the day of our departure. In the room, which, from its containing about a dozen volumes, the Colonel called his library, I saw on his desk the portrait of a ferocious royal tiger, which he had sketched in India, and had exhibited to us the evening before. He had been giving it, I suppose some additional touches, for a pencil lay beside it. The proximity of the pencil proved my ruin; for seeing the words, "Drawn on the spot," in his own hand at the bottom, an irresistible impulse seized me to add the additional ones, "in the absence of the tiger." The interpolation, at once reflecting on his veracity and his courage, did not meet his eye till some days after our departure. The moment he saw it, he was at no loss to discover its author, made another will instantly in favour of some distant relations, and died not long after he made it. At this most seasonable juncture, my father-in-law, who, though overflowing with affection for his daughter, had possibly, with Shakspeare, a fine poetical feeling respecting "the uses of adversity," withdrew, on some kind parental pretence or other, the little stipend he had allowed us.

In this ebb of our fortunes, Mrs. Gregory Hipkins found relief in amusement, and amusement at the play. All

the world was about that time mad to see the young Roscius, an urchin not above four feet high, play the heroic characters of Shakspeare. He was, however, at the height of his fame;-the universal theme of that idiot wonder, which, at certain periods, leads the playgoing part of the public by the nose, and fills the theatres to overflowing. We succeeded in getting into the pit, without any accident worth mentioning, unless it was the loss of a valuable shawl from my wife's shoulders, the gift of our dear departed uncle, who had scaled the walls of a zenana, to receive it as a gift from the fair hands of a rich Begum, who was in love with him, having first put to death half-a-dozen Mussulman guards, who, with naked scimitars, opposed his entrance.

We were not so fortunate in getting out. The inconvenient vomitories of a London playhouse are proverbial. On this occasion there was such a pressure, that Mrs. Hipkins found great difficulty in keeping hold of my arm, and I had to endure grumblings of the true conjugal kind without end-"Dear me Gregory, how can you be so stupid-Lord, how you pull-Heavens, why don't you come on!" I could get on no farther. There had been seated next to me a person with a wooden leg, which had more than once bruised my shins during the performance, and, by its accursed proximity, was still destined to torment me; for it had fixed itself upon my foot, and kept me immovable, and in great agony, till the tide of human beings passed by, separating my wife from me, and carrying that gentle creature onwards in its vortex. In vain I remonstrated, bellowed, swore

he himself could not stir, for a contiguous door-post, behind which the crowd had jammed him. At length he released me, and again feeling the pressure of a female arm upon my own, I hobbled on, deeming myself not unfortunate in having so soon been rejoined by Mrs. Hipkins. At this moment a pressure of the hand, somewhat tenderer than betokens the second post-matrimonial year of couples much more tender than Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Hipkins, induced me to turn my face towards her. Unspeakable horror-one moment for the magic pen of Spenser! to paint me the lineaments of the foulest of hags, that ogled, as I bent my head beneath a flaunting, tawdry bonnet, with a grin that revealed teeth of every size, shape and hue, huddled together like gravestones that had felt the upheaving of an earthquake—and

breathing-powers of heaven, rather of hell-such vapours as were never brushed from the unwholesome fens of Sierra Leone itself" Dear Gregory," she croaked, "beloved, have I found you at last?" She must have caught my name from my wife, as she followed us on our return from the play, into the pit avenue. "Dear Gregory "-Frantic even to madness, I strove to shake her off, with efforts almost supernatural; but she clung to me as the venomed shirt to Alcides, renewing her unearthly raptures, and beseeching me not to desert her, in tones, or rather howls, of so unusual a kind, as to invite a crowd of linkboys and hackney-coachmen to take an interest in the spectacle. The philosophy of the moment is the best in these cases. "It is a poor unhappy maniac," I said, walking quietly homewards, and hanging down my ears, as Horace did, when he vainly strove to shake off the friend he met in the Via Sacra of Rome. But did my eyes deceive me? No; they did not.

A few yards onwards, and not many from my own residence, I could perceive Mrs. Gregory Hipkins in close proximity to a tall Irish hussar, who had sat next her at the play. She was leaning on his arm, and listening to his discourse, or rather rhodomontade, with much earnestness. The proximity of person, too, was greater than was required in the casual escort of a gentleman to a lady who accidentally stood in need of his protection. In the meanwhile, the increasing raptures of the hideous Duessa still sticking to my arm, attracted the notice of my wife and the hussar, who turned back to have their share of the diversion.

"This poor wretch," I said to Mrs Hipkins, "is out of her mind. Common humanity will not suffer me to use violent means of getting rid of her."

"Oh, Mr Hipkins," replied my amiable spouse, "your part of the piece is well got up. An old attachment perhaps."

I relished her irony but little, and that of her Hibernian gallant still less, who, eyeing the withered fragment of the female form that hung on my arm, ranted in the truest of brogues, "Warm in their ashes live her wonted fires !"

Had my arm been unfettered by its loathsome burden, I should have aided his gravitation to the earth by an immediate application of my fist to the untenanted skull of this most impudent of blockheads. But I was bent upon effecting my deliverance. It was a struggle that lasted

three or four minutes, during which Mrs. Gregory Hipkins, with her one-eyed beau (I forgot to mention that her Apollo was a mutilated statue) walked towards my house with all possible composure. Nor was it but by the fortunate accident of my persecutor's stumbling on a broken part of the pavement, and thereby losing hold of my arm, that I succeeded in giving her a push that laid her at full length in the mud that had collected in the chasm, and breaking away from her in the midst of mingled moans for the desertion of "her Gregory," and the ruin of her gros de Naples gown, and Brussels veil. My wife was at the door, in the act of wishing her Damon good night; but there was something in the mode of wishing it, that "denoted a foregone conclusion." I rushed in-Mrs. Hipkins had squatted herself on a sofa. She sighed, as vulgar women do on such occasionsalas! Gregory Hipkins the Unlucky had made some months before the plea. sant discovery that his wife was essentially vulgar-and genuine thorough-bred vulgarity is a compound of all that is horrid in the female creation-and began a series of upbraidings after the truest precedents of vulgar women.

"Well, Mr. Hipkins-you have parted on good terms, I trust, with your old flame ?" she ejaculated.

"And you with yours, I hope, madam," was my reply.

A sort of peace was patched up. It seems that she had met her friend Captain Mahoney somewhere before, and that the acquaintance was renewed by his accidentally sitting next to her at the play. The step of captain, indeed, was a piece of promotion she herself gave him, perhaps euphoniæ gratia; for the fellow was only an ensign.

"And you know, Gregory, I could not decline his arm, when I lost you in the crowd; besides, really, he was so civil, really."

My own story told itself; and Mrs. Hipkins was, or pretended to be, satisfied.

Strange incidents bring on strange indispositions. Mrs. Gregory Hipkins became bilious. Cheltenham is the only place for bilious people. Her whole family, she pleaded, were afflicted with "the bile," and Cheltenham had cured them, one after the other. I had no counter plea but the hourly-wasting condition of my purse. What is that against an expedition on which a female sets her heart? So behold us inmates of Stiles's boarding-house at Cheltenham.

"It is written!" says the Turk. I was still to be the victim of these proximities. We were sitting down at the public dining-table, when who should advance towards my wife, and, with the easy assurance of a face thrice dipped in the brazen stream of the Shannon, take his seat next her, but the same Captain Mahoney! He honoured me with a slight token of recognition, and began pouring his unmeaning volubilities into her ear; and really Mrs. Gregory Hipkins did seriously incline to hear them. Next day-several days in succession - the same proximity of seat-the same stream of nothings absorbing all her faculties; but by degrees a closer contiguity of head and cheek, and the talk frequently subsiding into murmurs.

I was always inclined to think jealousy a very foolish species of self- tormenting. The woman who makes a man jealous is never worth being jealous about. But who can control his fate? We were seated at the dinner-table as usual—the Captain of course, next to Mrs. Hipkins. The jangling of a post-chaise was heard at the door; and in a few minutes bounced into the apartment-accursed fatality!-the infernal hag that had tormented me to death on the night of the play. Seeing the chair next my own unoccupied, toadlike she squatted in it, with an agility of which I did not deem her capable, and began a series of embraces-the mere recollection of which brings a cold fainting sickness over me even at this moment. I brushed them off as well as I could; but to stop her tongue, whilst it was revelling in the maddest hyperboles of fondness, was impossible. "Dear Gregory-beloved Gregory! We meet to part no more! Cruel man, to leave me in that dirty puddle-my gros de Naples will never more be fit to wear.'

All eyes were upon me. A buzz went round-“ A pleasing recognition," said

one.

"He looks confoundedly sheepish," remarked another. "His wife does not seem over-pleased," said a third. "Wife!" observed a fourth, with an air of positive information, "don't you see that the lady who is just arrived is his first wife, who is come to claim her husband?" And in this interpretation, which, merely implying that I was guilty of bigamy, recommended itself by its simplicity, every one acquiesced. Nay, I could distinctly hear a young barrister at the end of the table laying it down to be a felony, and quoting the Duchess of Kingston's case to prove that it was clergyable.

My tormentor's plate being laden with

meat, I had a short respite whilst she devoured it. The farce, however, which was so highly amusing to every body but myself, was soon renewed, and mo.. tioning Mrs. Hipkins to follow me, I endeavoured to steal away. But Mrs. Hipkins, amiable woman, not wishing to increase the uproar, as I supposed, stirred not, and the frantic bedlamite again clung round me. In vain I strove to impress the company with the obvious fact, that the woman was insane. Probably I might have succeeded, had not the unaccountable conduct of Mrs. Hipkins encouraged a theory less favourable to me. Some, however, were candid enough to admit the insanity-but they believed it was my misconduct that had occasioned it.

The hag followed me into the High Street, whither I had betaken myself as a refuge, and renewed her loathsome endearments. At last, seeing a mob of a less refined class collecting around us, I thought the jest was becoming somewhat too serious, and called in the aid of a constable or two, who, with some difficulty, took her into custody. Thus the affair would have ended, had it been that of any other of the myriads that people God's earth-but Gregory Hipkins the Unlucky. The sage tribunal of every library, the assembled wisdom of the Pump-room, gave it against me. It was quite clear that I had married a second wife, the first being still living, which the young barrister had convinced them amounted to bigamy--having, moreover, clapped my first wife into prison to get rid of her evidence. thought that a magistrate should call on me to find bail-others thought that I ought not to be at large on any terms whatever.

The lawyer

Conjugal disputes are settled or revived at night. I bitterly reproached Mrs. Gregory Hipkins. She was dreadfully affected by my reproaches-and went to sleep. The next morning she rose early, to take the waters at the pump-room. Worn out by the petty persecutions of the preceding day, I claimed the privilege of a protracted slumber. I could remark, however, that she was a considerable time at her toilet-and heard, though indistinctly, a confused noise or rustling, and a stirring of band-boxes betokening a packing-up. Nor was I deceived. On going down into the breakfast-room, I learned that Mrs. Gregory Hipkins and Captain Mahoney had departed four hours before, seated next to each other in a post-chaise.

Blackwood's Magazine.