44 Nay, there is a white Currant Bush, trained up on trellice against the loun sunny walls, and thickly clustering with berries, in their lucid roundness almost as large as grapes,-put out your hand and pull a few, and to the taste they are as sweet and luscious too, as from Lorraine or Provencethat white currant-bush, with innocent thorns tipped with silk and velvet, so that you may pluck ungloved, we declare, is liker than even the amiable poet himself, to William Procter Barry Cornwall, the delight of the suburban fruit-gardens, and furnishing to tender virgins an exquisite dessert-or when distilled by household matron, a wine that never intoxicates, and worthy a gold medal from Mr Loudon, the ingenious editor of the Gardener's Magazine.-Out of the sun altogether, stuck in among the gravel, and sorely stunted because of no manure, that dwindled, dwarfed, diminutive of the small black red hairy gooseberry, no leaves, few berries, and nearly all jag, is a most fearful picture indeed of a Cockney, whose name is needless-while that other, the bramble yonder, tufted chiefly with tags of dirty wool and hair, which a singing bird rather than peck at, would go without a nest, is a staring and ragged likeness of an unmentionable sonnetteer in the last stage of a consumption,-sick and sorry, weak and worthless, and, ere another month go by, to be pronged up by the little decayed root, flung over the hedge amongst nettles, and there left to rot in the general rubbish. Hactenus of plants. Now look at that Castle, a noble ruin. Yet not a ruin either, though old, and belonging to the olden time. On its head a crown of battlements-for hair, wall flowers-granite for its body, "cased in the unfeeling armour of old time" -and "seated on a heaven-kissing hill." Cliffs guard it on the right below which" goes a river large," sweeping round a loch-behind a morass, in which "armies whole might sink," in front the everlasting mountains. See how like the figure of a man! What a trenched forehead, yet how bold! That "coign of vantage" is the nose! That rent makes a mouth, from which the wind plays like a warlike harper. A grim upper lip-and a chin that defies the ele ments. A giant to fear and to vene rate! And what has become of your So with clouds and mountains, they. 66 very To The Monkey has not had justice done him, we repeat and insist upon it; for what right have you to judge of a whole people, from a few isolated individuals, and from a few isolated individuals, too, running up poles with a chain round their waist, twenty grinning in ones or twos through the times the length of their own tail, or eyes are red with perpetual weepingbars of a cage in a menagerie? His and his smile is sardonic in captivity. His fur is mouldy and mangy, and he is manifestly ashamed of his tail, prehenhands, as you may say," miserable sile no more-and of his paws, matches to his miserable feet. Senegal; or if that be too far off for know him as he is, you must go to a trip during the summer vacation, to tar, and see him at his gambols among the Rock of Gebir, now called Gibralthe cliffs. Sailor nor slater would ing on his head on a ledge of six inches, have a chance with him there, standfive hundred feet above the level of the sea, without ever so much as once tumbling down; or hanging at the same height from a bush by the tail, he were flower or fruit. There he to dry, or air, or sun himself, as if him young, clap a pair of breeches on is, a Monkey indeed; but you catch him, and an old red jacket, and oblige him to dance a saraband on the stones of a street, or perch upon the shoulder of Bruin, equally out of his natu→ ral element, which is a cave among the woods. Here he is but the Ape of a Monkey. Now if we were to catch you young, good subscriber or contributor, yourself, and put you into a cage to crack nuts and pull ugly faces, although you might, from continued practice, do both to perfection, at a shilling a-head for grown up ladies dren and servants, and even at a lower and gentlemen, and sixpence for chilrate after the collection had been some weeks in town, would you not think it exceedingly hard to be judged of in that one of your predicaments, not only individually, but nationally—that is, not only as Ben Hoppus, your own name, but as John Bull, the name of the people of which you are an incarcerated specimen? You would keep incessantly crying out against this with angry vociferation, as a most unwarrantable and unjust Test and Corpo ration Act. And, no doubt, were an Ourang-outang to see you in such a situation, he would not only form a most mean opinion of you as an individual, but go away with a most false impression of the whole human race. It is therefore highly gratifying to us to see the Monkey in the hands of a man of genius like Thomas Land seer. Indeed, the Landseers are a family of geniuses-father and sons. Like Goldsmith, they touch nothing which they do not adorn; and Thomas has here touched the Monkey, who, unlike the lovely young Lavinia when unadorned adorned the most, looks like a man as he is, when dressed and acting like a man on the stage of the Theatre of Human Life. Several other artists, we know, have moralized the Monkey; and of their philosophical works it will give us pleasure to speak in a future Number; but we suspect our present painter is the best of them all; and on the principle of "meliores priores," we begin with the Monkeyana of Thomas Landseer.. Even an entire family of prigs is a pleasant and impressive sight not a single one,-father, mother, brother, or sister, with the least spark of common sense or feeling to disturb the harmony-to break the effect of the "tottle of the whole." But a family of geniuses is still better, perhaps because so much rarer; and, therefore, we prefer the Landseers and the Roscoes, very much indeed, to the Hunts and the Hazlitts. What vivid-minded fellows great painters must be! Poets are nothing to them in distinctness of conception. Poets, it is true, "give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name." But still they are airy nothings-for they are made of words, and words are air. But painters give you form, shape, colour-we had almost said substance. We ourselves, who are a poet, could give you a very tolerable Monkey in words,-either a prose or a verse Mon key; but what a poor, paltry, din, and indistinct Monkey would he be, in comparison with the drawn, etched, engraved, large-paper-proof Monkey; of a Thomas Landseer, playing the Pedagogue, the Pupil, or the Pugilist? First of all, here is a Monkey in the character of Paul Pry. We doubt not that it is excellent; but, would you believe it, we have never seen Liston in that farce? Nor do we care a drachm though we never see him-for we are sick of Liston's buffoonery. London is a great goose. She will keep gabbling for years about the most nauseous nonsense, as if it were mirth, humour, and wit. Mr Poole, we believe, is the author of Paul Pry, and Mr Poole is a man of true genius. But Paul Pry, though we never saw him, is, we fear, not a little of a bore-at least so is every noodle who comes in upon you at supper from the theatre, and enacts you a bit of Liston or Murray in that character. The cockneys have spoiled Liston, who might have been an excellent, perhaps a great comic actor, but for their childish and infantile fancy for his face; and that is a great deal for us to say, after having seen and heard him murder Dominie Sampson, on a stage by lamp and chandelier light, before upwards of a thousand people, not one of whom, however, we are happy to say, could move a muscle at the spectacle, except those of disgust and contempt. Mr Liston, who is a gentleman and a man of originality, ought not to suffer himself to make himself ridiculous and entertaining in the eyes of fools and idiots. We excuse Mr Landseer and Mr Poole for giving in to the folly of, "I hope I don't intrude," for there is no great harm in sacrificing one's own taste in a trifle, to that of the bairnly public of Cockaigne. They who "live to please, must please to live ;" and, just as might have been expected, the Cockney critics have all exclaimed, on viewing this Paul Pry, " inimitable—inimitable. Yet even Landseer cannot give us Liston's face that face which"-and then off they go with their impotent attempts at imaginative exaggeration-as impotent as would be the attempts of a precocious little master, who had been put into shorts and a long-tailed coat at five, to describe, to his quondamwet, nunc-dry nurse, the pantomime of Punchinello. What a different thing is his Politician! There you have nature, universal and particular, and no sooner does the eye fall upon the Monkey, with spectacle on nose, than you have him at once, and know, as it were, the very paragraph of which he is endeavouring to comprehend some small inkling of the meaning; no easy matter, you will allow, in daily, morning or evening, weekly or monthly periodical writings; this Magazine by no means excluded. He is hard at work, on the head of a column of what Cob bett calls, "The Bloody Old Times." Not the leader-no-no-not the leader-our Monkey won't try to crack that nut, for no monkey's teeth can stand that; and he remembers, that when, by dint of excessive grin, he had once on a time contrived to crush the casket, it instantly filled his mouth, his maw, and his pouch, with one puff of that inexplicable sort of dust that fills what men and monkeys call in boyhood, the devil's snuff-box. But he is at a side column. Probably a letter from Lisbon-about the Constitution. Don Miguel puz. zles his "villainous low"-browed pate, nor less that old hag his mother, and the Black Cook. He is a Whig-a Radical. Ay, now he is attempting a tirade against tithes, and grinning at a blow at the Bishops. He is a pure Patriot, for no stake in the country has he, except a very tough and lean one, on every third Sunday. A Liberal! see how he hugs a rancid Examiner to his liver, pressing it down too with his elbow on that of his chair, in case some other march-of-mind monkey should come in upon his political privacy, his learned leisure, and carry off the filthy falsehood. He had really much better lay down the Leading Journal of Europe upon that fractured globe; for confound him if he understands its politics! Why, we verily believe he is at an article on the repeal of the Test Act, and now that it is repealed, why, he and other highminded monkeys like him can, without any violation of conscience or religion, accept office; on the faith of a Christian," they can, and without saying "I am a Protestant," for the good of the church, the country, and the king. A scribe in the Times, we have been somewhere told, could not endure this Monkey, calling him a poor Satyr. In that he shewed himself an ass. Thomas Landseer meant to etch a compliment to the Leading Journal of Europe, by shewing how a monkey of those political principles could descend in his zeal from the altitude of the Times to the lowest level of the Examiner. In his paw the extremes meet; nor do we doubt, that under the foot hidden in shade, (the other is stiffened in the foreground from hairy leg crossed over hairy knee,) are, a number of Maga with a Noctes, the Standard of the Evening, the Courier, and the Morning Post, by far the ablest daily papers now produced from the right side of the press. Better and better still, "The SchoolMaster is abroad." The Monkey, here, is a terrible Incarnation of Dr Busby and Mr Brougham. His birch reminds us, in size and shape, of the Broom with which that Old Black, now gone to the Nigritia of Hades, used some twenty years ago, perhaps less, to sweep that crossing in which Cheapside loses itself in St Paul's church-yard. Many are the pairs of juvenile breeches which he has unbut, toned and let down, and he hopes to live to unbutton and let down many more. The visible cries of the pupil in the paw of the pedagogue are enough to rive a heart of stone. Lord have mercy on the puerile world, when the march-of-intellect men are safely seated in their sway! All feeling, all religion, they have begun with flinging aside, as so many loathsome weeds. They will soon shew what is the full meaning, perfect import of the word Tyrant, and of the word Slave. Mrs Brownrigg, who" whipt three female prentices to death, and hid them in the coal-hole," will be like Mercy with the hand of moonlight and the dewy eyne, in comparison with the viragoes that will then rule the roast over the lower extremities of the female children of this unhappy land-the unsparing servants of Lycurgus, who whipped the little Spartans till their bottoms were as black as their broth, will be Moravians and Quakers by the side of the dreadful dominies that will then provide raw material for our male boarding-schools, academies, and colleges. All the past and present flogging of the population of this country, in tender years, will shrink up into absolute insignificance, in the future. Twenty obsolete birch-rods of the last, Dine with a march-of-intellect man, and only observe the downcast eyes of his pale-faced trembling wife-the knit brows of his sullen sons-the sulky sorrows of his joy-denied daughters, who, to escape the cruelties of that unnatural thraldom, would elope even with the devil or a dancing master. All that comes of your hardhearted, hard-headed, music-painting-and-poetry-despising, utilitarian, intellectual, all-in-all educationists, who know nothing so admirable as a steam-engine, and would wish to see the whole world worked by machinery. Flog away, then, old monkey-and, young monkey, squall in vain to the sky-for, "Lord help thee, silly one," there are no bowels now in heaven or on earth, and thy only comfort must be in thy agony, that the day may come, when thou wilt see that grim pedagogue a pauper-for there will be no Poor Laws then-torn by curs, with whom he is disputing a bone in the kennel of the street, while the stern street-keeper will scourge him off his beat, with a besom, to which that, under whose iron ribs thou now shriek'st, is a rod of Roses without a Thorn. The schoolmaster is abroad indeed! Then, say we, the clergyman must send him home, and a committee of such of the householders of the parish as still go to church, must frequently and narrowly inspect and examine him among his urchins, that he may not, by application of the unresting rod, render them for ever incapable of following any sedentary profession; and since he does not believe in the punishments of a future world, they must restrain him by a constant fear, and a frequent taste, of those of the present; such as dismissal, fine, imprisonment, and pillory; for of all murderers, depend upon it, an infidel schoolmaster, when once he gets fair ly abroad, will be the cruellest and most accurst. Plate fourth, two Monkeys gallop ing on an Ass, either from or to the devil-we hope the latter-is full of affrighted motion. We cannot say that we altogether understand it. "What, ho! does the devil drive-then we the dark. It is, however, remarkable, must needs get on," leaves us rather in that the mind frequently derives very great pleasure from what it but halfand-half comprehends the meaning of and it is so with ours in studying this monkey-ridden donkey. Perhaps it is a sort of unintended sequel to the "Schoolmaster is Abroad," and a couple of his pupils-parlour-boarders too-one of them at least, who has got a belt round his waist-are off and away out of his reach, on an animal appropriate to the establishment. They seem both fair ass-men, and as the one behind has hold of the donkey's tail with one hand, and that of his schoolfellow with the other, while the one before has twisted his fingers in the mane of the thistle-chewer, both in equal desperation indenting their toes into his sides, there is every prospect of their arriving unspilt at the end of their journey, "Quod felix faustumque sit," is the earnest prayer of their present well-wisher. The style in which the alarmed ass lays back his ears, is only to be equalled by that in which he flings up his heels, which, together with retroverted eye, open jaws, and blown belly, give us a lively idea of the Flying Childers. He cannot be going at less than the rate of ten miles an hour, and probably imagines, for fear is a gross exaggerator, that his velocity is that of a hundred. Were you to ask him where he is going, he would find some difficulty, we shrewdly suspect, in answering your question. If he carries on long so, he will not be able to fetch a bray for a fortnight. He is not only a useful, but positively a noble animal. We took So much for Part First. up Part Second with some little anxiety, for how seldom is the second of anything so good as the first? But, here, it is perhaps on the whole even better. Hookey Walker" we are hardly up to he is probably a portrait of some well-known kiddy about town. In a sort of bang-up great coat, with check handkerchief, enormous whiskers, cast-away hat, picked from the dunghill, scampishly ornamented with a stump of a tobacco-pipethe thumb of one outspread hand planted on the side of his snub-nose, and its little finger joined to the thumb of the other hand, similarly outspread as much as to say-"how are you off for soap? up to trap, eh ?" He hurkles along, curtailed of his fair proportions, a perfect picture, certainly, of a finished low blackguard. Is that anything near the truth of the matter, our dear Landseer? If not, pray pardon our stupidity, and recollect that we have not been in town for twenty years, nor ever seen the original. But the originals in Plate Second we have seen dancing on board a guard ship in sea-port. Jack and Poll, engaged in a Jig "When first I saw thee graceful move, Our male monkey here has the inexpressible Jack-Tar face to its utmost perfection. Take him for all in all, he is truly an able seaman. The swell ing on the tobacco-side of the cheek, which, you may observe, is always that which happens at the time to be the weather one, is scarcely perceptible through the wrinkles of the love-grin betokening his ecstacies. You might chuck a quartern of blue ruin, pewter and all, down his throat, for his mouth gapes in delight, as if he were about to bite off Poll's head in his passion. His eyes bright as new snuffed tallows-his near ear eagerly cocked up into a point-his black wiped wizen-his white straw hat, adhering to his pericranium by some principle known but to itself-his bent knees, thin thighs so whitely trowsered-splay feet, pumped and festooned on the instep with a bunch of ribbon -long, loose, pendent arms, with hands hanging away from wrists that show their bones from the short cuffs of the jacket-and then such a jacket, at which you give but a single glance, for from beneath the grotesque fundamental feature its cut displays, instead of from the nape of the neck, hangs down Jack's queue or tail, an ell and a nail long at the very least, and curling and twisting through its whole length, the tip a little turned up, just avoiding to brush the dust off the deck-there he dances-Jack's alive indeed-nor would he change places, not he indeed, with the Lord High Admiral. No wonder. For look at Pretty Poll, the Wapping Wurgin! Never looked monkey so modest. Her lips primly closed against the coming kiss; eyes cast down to the deck, half in bashfulness, half in admiration of Jack's jigging feet, which do indeed irresistibly heel and toe the plankmutch with long loose flying lappels, and ribband on the top of the head in the shape of a shamrock, a tempting trefoil indeed-in an old cut-down full-dress captain's uniform, by way of a gown or jacket, check apron patched about the knee with new, and her tail delicately hidden to the very tip within her red rustling petticoatwhy, no wonder that Jack, being a man, a monkey, and a British sailor, is madly in love-no wonder that he swears by all the saints and sinners in the fleet, that he will get spliced to Poll that very night, "For Love is Heaven, and Heaven is Love!" Plates Third and Fourth are both excellent-Duelling and Drunkenness. So-so-the country, we presume, neighbourhood of Chalk farm? excel. lent duelling ground—a sign-post, in shape not unlike a gallows, with this ominous direction or announcement, "Rubbish shot here," and such principals and such seconds! The first eager, in an agony of fear, for accommodation of all differences, on any terms, even on the most abject mutual apologies; the second, resolute and bloodthirsty, enraged at the thought of being defrauded of the fray by their respective poltroons. Turn over a new leaf, and, lo! two Monkeys staggering home from a debauch. This is the way to shew up the vice. It is as good as one of the best bits of Macnish. They have got drunk on pot after pot of porter-with a few final noggins of gin-one apparently rather the drunker of the two-laughing drunk-and disposed to sit down, imagining himself at home—and almost looking as if he were going to try to sing the other, apparently the drunker of the two likewise, weeping drunk, and wondering, and of his wondering finding no end, if it be written in the book of fate that he is ever again in this wicked world to see the house in which he was born, twenty-four years ago, and has lived in, he conjectures, till within some unintelligible event, but in what street, of what town, and what num |