I should be so base and mad as to marry a low-born, low-bred, ignorant, uneducated, crafty, ay, crafty and designing beggar,-were all forgotten in my delirium,-if indeed it were delirium, and not an everlastingly-sacred devotion of the soul to nature and to truth. For in what was I deluded? A voice,—a faint and dewy voice, deadened by the earth that fills up her grave, and by the turf that, at this very hour, is expanding its primroses to the dew of heaven,-answers, nothing!"

"In

"Ha! ha! ha!" exclaims some reader in derision," here's an attempt at the pathetic, a miserable attempt indeed, for who cares about the death of a mean hut-girl? we are sick of low life." Why, as to that matter, who cares for the death of any one mortal being? Who weeps for the death of the late Emperor of all the Russias? Who wept over Napoleon the Great? When Chatham or Burke, Pitt or Fox died -don't pretend to tell lies about a nation's tears. And if yourself, who, perhaps, are not in low life, were to die in half an hour, (don't be alarmed,) all who knew you, except two or three of your bosom friends, who, partly from being somewhat dull, and partly from wishing to be decent, might blubber-would walk along Prince's Street at the fashionable hour of three, the very day after your funeral. Nor would it ever enter their heads to abstain from a comfortable dinner at the British Hotel, ordered, perhaps, a month ago, at which time you were in rude health, merely be cause you had foolishly allowed a cold to fasten upon your lungs, and carry you off in the prime and promise of your professional life. In spite of all your critical slang, therefore, Mr Editor or Master Contributor to some literary journal, SHE, though a poor Scottish Herd, was most beautiful; and when, but a week after taking farewell of her, I went, according to our tryst, to fold her in my arms, and was told by her poor father that she was dead,-ay, dead and buried-that she had no existence-that neither the daylight nor I should ever more be gladdened by her presence-that she was in a coffin, six feet in earth-that the worms were working their way towards the body, to crawl into her bosom-that she was fast becoming one mass of corruption-when I awoke

from the dead-fit of horrid dreams in which I had lain on the floor of my Agnes's own cottage, and cursed the sight of the heaven and the earth, and shuddered at the thought of the dread and dismal God-when I

We wish that we had lying on the table before us Grahame's pleasant Poem, "The Birds of Scotland;" but we lent our copy some years ago to a friend-and a friend never returns a borrowed book. But here is a very agreeable substitute-" A Treatise on British Song-Birds," published by John Anderson, jun., Edinburgh, and Simpkin and Marshall, London. The small musicians are extremely well engraved by Mr Scott, of Edinburgh, from very correct and beautiful drawings, done by an English artist, and there is a well-written introduction, of 40 pages, from the pen of Mr Patrick Syme. We presume that the rest of the letterpress is by the same gentleman-and it doeshim very great credit. The volume includes observations on their natural habits, and manner of incubation; with remarks on the treatment of the young, and management of the old birds, in a domestic state.

"The delightful music of song-birds is, perhaps, the chief cause why these charming little creatures are, in all countries, so highly prized. Music is an universal language;-it is understood and cherished in every country

the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized individual, are all passionately fond of music, particularly of melody. But, delightful as music is, perhaps there is another reason that may have led man to deprive the warblers of the woods and fields of liberty, particularly in civilized states, where the intellect is more refined, and, consequently, the feelings more adapted to receive tender impressions; -we mean the associations of ideas. Their sweet melody brings him more particularly in contact with groves and meadows-with romantic banks, or beautiful sequestered glades-the cherished scenes, perhaps, of his early youth. But, independent of this, the warble of a sweet song-bird is, in itself, very delightful ;—and, to men of sedentary habits, confined to cities by professional duties, and to their desks most part of the day, we do not know a more innocent or more agreeable recreation than the rearing and training of these little feathered musicians."

Now, we hear many of our readers crying out against the barbarity of confining the free denizens of the air in wire or wicker cages. Gentle readers, do, we pray, keep your compas sion for other objects. Or, if you are disposed to be argumentative with us, let us just walk down stairs to the larder, and tell the public truly what we there behold-three brace of partridges, two ditto of moor-fowl, a cock-pheasant, poor fellow,-a man and his wife of the aquatic, or duck kind, and a wood-cock, vainly presenting his long Christmas bill

"Some sleeping kill'dAll murder'd."—

Why, you are indeed a most logical reasoner, and a most considerate Christian, when you launch out into an invective against the cruelty exhibited in our cages. Let us leave this den of murder, and have a glass of our wife's home-made frontiniac in her own boudoir. Come, come, sir,-look on this newly-married couple of canaries. -The architecture of their nest is certainly not of the florid order, but my Lady Yellowlees sits on it a well-satisfied bride. Come back in a day or two, and you will see her nursing triplets. Meanwhile, hear the earpiercing fife of the bridegroom!Where will you find a set of happier people, unless, perhaps, it be in our parlour, or our library, or our nursery? For, to tell you the truth, there is a cage or two in almost every room of the house. Where is the cruelty-here, or in your blood-stained larder? But you must eat, you reply. We answer-not necessarily birds. The question is about birds-cruelty to birds; and were that sagacious old wild-goose, whom one single moment of heedlessness brought last Wednesday to your hospitable board, at this moment alive, to bear a part in our conversation, can you dream that, with all your Jeffreyan ingenuity and eloquence, you could persuade him-the now defunct and dejected-that you were under the painful necessity of eating him with stuffing and apple-sauce?

The intelligent author of the Treatise on British Birds does not condescend to justify the right we claim to encage them; but he shows his genuine humanity in instructing us how to render happy and healthful their imprisonment. He says very prettily,

"What are town-gardens and shrubberies in squares, but an attempt o ruralize the city? So strong is the de sire in man to participate in country pleasures, that he tries to bring some of them even to his room. Plants and birds are sought after with avidity, and cherished with delight. With flowers he endeavours to make his apartments resemble a garden; and thinks of groves and fields, as he listens to the wild sweet melody of his little captives. Those who keep and take an interest in song-birds, are often at a loss how to treat their little warblers during illness, or to prepare the proper food best suited to their various constitutions; but that knowledge is absolutely necessary to preserve these little creatures in health: for want of it, young amateurs and bird-fanciers have often seen, with regret, many of their favourite birds perish.'

Now, here we confess is a good physician. In Edinburgh we understand there are about 500 medical practitioners on the human race,-and we have dog-doctors, and horse-doctors, who come out in numbers--but we have had no bird-doctors. Yet often, too often, when the whole house rings from garret to cellar with the cries of children teething, or in the hoopingcough, the little linnet sits silent on his perch, a moping bunch of feathers, and then falls down dead, when his lilting life might have been saved by the simplest medicinal food skilfully administered. Surely if we have physicians to attend our tread-mills, and regulate the diet and day's work of merciless ruffians, we should not suffer our innocent and useful prisoners thus to die unattended. Why do not the Ladies of Edinburgh form themselves into a Society for this purpose?

Not one of all the philosophers in the world has been able to tell us what is happiness. Sterne's Starling is weakly supposed to have been miserable. Probably he was one of the most contented birds in the universe. Does confinement, the closest, most uncompanioned confinement-make one of ourselves unhappy? Is the shoemaker, sitting with his head on his knees in a hole in the wall from morning to night, in any respect to be pitied? Is the solitary orphan, that sits all day sewing in a garret, while the old woman for whom she works is out washing, an object of compassion? or

the widow of fourscore, hurkling over the embers, with a stump of a pipe in her toothless mouth? Is it so sad a thing indeed to be alone? or to have one's motions circumscribed within the narrowest imaginable limits? Nonsense all. Nine-tenths of mankind, in manufacturing and commercial countries, are cribbed and confined into little room,-generally, indeed, together, but often solitary.

Then, gentle reader, were you ever in a Highland shieling? It is built of turf, and is literally alive; for the beautiful heather is blooming, and wild-flowers too-and walls and roof are one sound of bees. The industrious little creatures must have come several long miles for their balmy spoil. There is but one human creature in that shieling, but he is not at all solitary. He no more wearies of that lonesome place, than do the sun-beams or the shadows. To himself alone, he chants his old Gaelic songs, or frames wild ditties of his own to the raven or red deer. Months thus pass on; and he descends again to the lower country. Perhaps he goes to the wars-fights-bleeds-and returns to Badenoch or Lochaber; and once more, blending in his imagination the battles of his own regiment, in Egypt, or Spain, or at Waterloo, with the deeds done of yore by Ossian sung, lies contented by the door of the same shieling, restored and beautified, in which he had dreamt away the summers of his youth.

To return to birds in cages ;-they are, when well, uniformly as happy as the day is long. What else could oblige them, whether they will or no, to burst out into song,-to hop about so pleased and pert,-to play such fantastic tricks like so many whirligigs,-to sleep so soundly, and to awake into a small, shrill, compressed twitter of joy at the dawn of light? So utterly mistaken was Sterne, and all the other sentimentalists, that his Starling, who he absurdly opined was wishing to get out, would not have stirred a peg had the door of his cage been flung wide open, but would have pecked like a very game-cock at the hand inserted to give him his liberty. Depend upon it, that Starling had not the slightest

All

idea of what he was saying; and had he been up to the meaning of his words, would have been shocked at his ungrateful folly. Look at Canaries, and Chaffinches, and Bullfinches, and "the rest," how they amuse themselves for a while flitting about the room, and then finding how dull a thing it is to be citizens of the world, bounce up to their cages, and shut the door from the inside, glad to be once more at home. Begin to whistle or sing yourself, and forthwith you have a duet, or a trio. We can imagine no more perfectly tranquil and cheerful life than that of a Goldfinch in a cage, in Spring, with his wife and his children. his social affections are cultivated to the utmost. He possesses many accomplishments unknown to his brethren among the trees ;-he has never known what it is to want a meal in times of the greatest scarcity; and he admires the beautiful frost-work on the windows when thousands of his feathered friends are buried in the snow, or what is almost as bad, baked up into pies, and devoured by a large supper-party of both sexes, who fortify their flummery and flirtation by such viands, and, remorseless, swallow dozens upon dozens of the warblers of the woods.

Ay, ay, Mr Goldy! you are wondering what I am now doing, and speculating upon me with arch eyes and elevated crest, as if you would know the subject of my lucubrations. What the wiser or better wouldst thou be of human knowledge? Sometimes that little heart of thine goes pit-a-pat, when a great, ugly, staring contributor thrusts his inquisitive nose within the wires-or when a strange cat glides round and round the room, fascinating thee with the glare of his fierce fixed eyes;-but what is all that to the woes of an Editor?-Yes, sweet simpleton ! do you not know that I am the Editor of Blackwood's Magazine-Christopher North! Yes, indeed, we are that very man, that self-same much-calumniated man-monster and Ogre.There, there!-perch on my shoulder, and let us laugh together at the whole world.

In spite of all the sins, both of omission and commission, with which Tory, Whig, and Radical Journals have, perhaps justly, charged them, these are two volumes of extraordinary interest-nor are they discreditable to Mr Moore. The subject was, indeed, a most difficult and dangerous one, nor was it possible for a man of Mr Moore's peculiar opinions, temperament, and genius, to treat it without involving himself in a sea of troubles. No doubt, were we to submit his work to a strict and unsparing scrutiny, we could get up a long, laboured article, full of refutations and imputations and confutations, that would prove him to be one of the greatest criminals on our annual Calendar. But as we have declared this to be a month of Mercy-we shall treat Mr Moore with a gentleness that may well surprise and delight him-a gentleness, indeed, which even in our most truculent Numbers we generally display towards every writer who has at any time delighted us-and need we say, that that has been done by the poet of Lalla Rookh?

Let us take first the Politics-and get done with them in not many words -then a paragraph or two about Sheridan, as Richard Brinsley in domestic and social life-and finally, a few remarks on his Dramatic Genius. Each of these three subjects would furnish matter for an article-but we hate prosing-so hope to settle them all in one sober and sensible sheet.

Never was any secret betrayed with more naiveté, than the account which Mr Moore gives of the principles of the Whigs, in advocating and fostering the cause of reform. We cannot imagine the amazed looks with which Lord Grey, and the remnants and refuse of the Fox party, must have read the passage alluded to, without bursting into immoderate and remorseless laughter. Never was such a charge made by any of all the adversaries of the Foxites, as that little passage contains, where our author, speaking of the institution of the society of "The Friends of the People," explains the real views and motives with which Fox, Grey, Sheridan, &c. connected

themselves with that seditious confederacy. But the exposure of the hypocrisy is too interesting to be merely adverted to; we must, in justice to Mr Moore's simplicity and to Whig honesty, quote the passage.

"In the Spring of this year was esta blished the Society of The Friends of the People,' for the express purpose of obtaining a Parliamentary Reform. To this Association, which, less for its professed object than for the republican tendencies of some of its members, was particularly obnoxious to the loyalists of the day, Mr Sheridan, Mr Grey, and many others of the leading persons of the Whig party, belonged. Their Address to the People of England, which was put forth in the month of April, contained an able and temperate exposition of the grounds upon which they sought for Reform; and the names of Sheridan, Mackintosh,

Whitbread, &c., appear on the list of the Committee by which this paper was drawn up.

"It is a proof of the little zeal which Mr Fox felt at this period on the subject of Reform, that he withheld the sanction of his name from a Society, to which so many of his most intimate political friends belonged. Some notice was taken in the House of this symptom of backwardness in the cause; and Sheridan, in replying to the insinuation, said, that they wanted not the signature of his Right Honourable Friend to assure them of his concurrence. They had his bond in the steadiness of his political principles and the integrity of his heart.' Mr Fox himself, however, gave a more definite explanation of the circumstance. 'He might be asked,' he said, 'why his name was not on the list of the Society for Reform? and enormous grievances, he did not see His reason was, that though he saw great the remedy.' It is to be doubted, indeed, whether Mr Fox ever fully admitted the

principle upon which the demand for a

Reform is founded. When he afterwards

espoused the question so warmly, it seems to have been merely as one of those weapons caught up in the heat of a warfare, in which Liberty itself appeared to him too imminently endangered, to admit of the consideration of any abstract principle, except that summary one of the right of resistance to power abused. From what has been already said, too, of the language held by Sheridan on this subject,

P