This remarkable début acquired for his Lordship the honour of being reported to the Chinese local authorities, by the servants at the Custom-house, as a Barbarian Eye (which is a figurative term applied to his Lordship by the Chinese, to describe his office of superintendant), who, with three other English devils, had clandestinely stolen into Canton; and, according to report, his subsequent appearance, parading the wharf arm-in-arm with two offensive Europeans, in a rough sailor's jacket, has not at all tended to exalt him in the eyes of the Chinese, who are well known to attach high importance to appropriate dresses on public functionaries. The correspondence which subsequently took place, exhibits, we are compelled to acknowledge, reason and argument on the part of the Chinese; while on that of the British intruders, there is manifested a great deal of pugnacity and defiance, and little more. The Chinese nation,' says Governor Loo, has its laws; it is so everywhere. Even England has its laws. How much more the Celestial Empire! How flaming bright are its great laws and ordinances,' &c. His Lordship is then, through the Hong Merchants, admonished that he has violated those flaming bright laws, and is required by way of atonement to return to Macao, and there to await a regular permission to come to Canton. This he refuses to do, and says that nothing but fixed bayonets shall drive him out of the factory; which, be it still remembered, stands on the territory of China, and is no more than a place allotted by the government for the temporary use of the merchants, during the season of trade. It would seem, however, by this novel proceeding of his Lordship, that he designed to convert it into a freehold estate. Possession is nine points of the law, according to the old English adage; and for any other point, such as the point of right, it would probably appear to his Lordship, as it has to some recent writers on this subject, very ridiculous' to say any thing about it. It appears that the Hong merchants, considering that they had some interest in the settlement of all disputes between their nation and ours, and in the peaceful management of a hitherto profitable trade, invited the English merchants at Canton to a conference in the Consoo-hall; but in this his Lordship forestalled them, by inviting a public meeting of those merchants at an earlier hour on the same day, in the Chamber of Commerce. At that meeting the very reasonable proposal of the Hong merchants was read and rejected, and the consequence was that THE TRADE WAS STOPPED. Lord Napier threatened to anchor before Canton with his ships of war. Supposing him to have done so, would he fire on the city or would he not? If he did not, he might expect to be laughed at, as swaggerers and bravadoes in China have been before him. If he did, he would be guilty of the murder of every Chinese who might fall before his cannon shot. The act would be one of unjustifiable aggression on an independent state; leading to war, the duration and consequences of which it would be impossible to foresee. Had the scheme of intimidating the Chinese never been tried, the inexpediency of such an experiment would be less apparent than it is; but it has been attempted before, and unfortunately, in every instance, from the imprisonment of Mr. Flint, in 1757, to the stoppage of trade in 1829, resulted in discredit and considerable pecuniary loss. On these occasions, as the Chinese express it, we lost face,' by abandoning the high ground and peremptory tone, which for the occasion we had assumed, and by conceding the matter in dispute. This was the result in the Linton affair, after the East India Company had lost 100,000l. in tonnage of the ships, which were detained in China till the dispute was settled. If we have been correctly informed, there were 60,000 tons of British ships in China in July last, of which the prime cost was 71. per ton, and they were then valued at 41. per ton. The stoppage of trade, occasioned by Lord Napier's manifestation, will certainly not improve the value of the tonnage, or lower the price of tea, of which the value has risen in the market about four-pence per lb. The The very crisis predicted in the former part of this article has occurred; and the intelligence of it has arrived as this sheet was going to press. Lord Napier is no more ! He has fallen a victim to the error of his proceedings, as already described. After long discussions with the subordinate authorities at Canton, he was compelled to re-embark for Macao on the 21st, as it is stated, in bad health, probably through vexation, and in a sort of custody; the vessel in which he travelled being surrounded by Chinese junks, with mandarins and musicians on board, who kept up a perpetual clamour with their gongs, to his great annoyance. Soon after his arrival in Macao, on the 27th of September, he fell a victim to fever; dying there on the 21st of October. He was buried, at his own request, by the side of his late Chinese Secretary, Dr. Morrison. Lord Napier's visit to China has not been unattended by bloodshed. The frigates were called up, and fired on the Chinese forts. The Chinese returned the fire, not without effect, and there has been slaughter on both sides; but, of course, more loss on that of the Chinese than on ours. Having expelled the Barbarian Eye, the Chinese have, it is said, with great affectation of magnanimity re-opened the trade, giving forth that they do not visit the sins of one party on the head of another; but at the same time have commanded all British ships of war to quit the China Seas, which order has been obeyed. Mr. Davis, who succeeded to the office of Chief Superintendent, has written home for fresh orders; till the receipt of which he designs to take no further steps. ON OLD ENGLISH POETICAL FACETIE. ORDER and arrangement are very good things where they can be conveniently observed: where they cannot, it would be mere folly to make the attempt; and, excepting as to the general subjects, we shall not pretend to carry any such design into execution. The chief materials of the present, and of some other papers, will be derived from the extraordinary library of the late Mr. Heber, including books that have not yet been sold, as well as those already brought to the hammer. In the first instance we propose to speak of old English poetical Facetiæ, avoiding as much as possible ground that has been previously trodden. Our principal claim to attention will be derived from the novelty of the topic and the rarity of the works by which it will be illustrated. In treating it, while we reject the trammels of order, we nevertheless intend to proceed with some regard to system. We confine ourselves to poetical Facetiæ, not because there is not a great deal of amusement, and knowledge too, to be obtained from prose productions of the same class, but because to examine the latter with any degree of minuteness and attention would occupy too much space, and by opening too wide a field of inquiry and discussion, lead us far out of our way. We should have to speak of the Hundred Merry Tales, the Tales and Quick Answers, and the Merry Tales of the The Mad Men of Gotham, all printed in the reign of Henry VIII.; of those of the Jests of Scoggin and of Will Somers ; of those of Tarlton and Peele; and so on down to the Wit and Mirth of Taylor the Water Poet, or to the imputed jests of the celebrated Archy. It would not be difficult to trace many of the stories inserted seriatim in each of these collections, not only from work to work as they came out at various periods, but up to their originals in Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. latter language, indeed, was a most fruitful source from which such men as Andrew Borde (author of the Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham, and probably of other similar works published about the same date) drew his materials. Not a few of these have come down to our own day, and with certain modernizations are found in nearly every edition of Joe Miller. Those industrious, acute, and learned antiquaries, the Brothers Grimm, in their collections of humorous narratives current among the peasantry of Germany, &c. have given a Tale, which with others has recently been rendered into English; but the translator was not at all aware that it made its appearance in our language three hundred years ago, and that its real original was in all probability Italian. We first meet with it in English in the volume called, Tales and Quick An swers, printed by Berthelet, near the middle of the reign of Henry VIII. and after undergoing various changes in the interval, we again find it employed in Pasquil's Jests mixed with Mother Bunch's Merriments, 1604, 4to, which was one of the most curious books of the kind sold in the fourth part of Mr. Heber's collection. There it is given as follows: "A deceipt of the hope of the covetous with a Turnip. "The King of France, Charles the Fifth, being presented by a poor Gardener with a turnip of a huge greatness, gave him for his reward 500 crowns, giving him charge to lay it up, and keep it safely for him till he did call for it; which bounty being noted of all his court, and chiefly observed by one covetous rich officer of his house, caused him, in hope of some greater recompence for a greater present, to present his Majesty with a fair and goodly horse; which the King thankfully receiving, noting his miser able nature, and that his gift rather did proceed from hope of gain than good will, called for the turnip, wherewith he rewarded the miserable asse; at which he no less fretted than all that saw it heartily laughed." How much Messsrs. Grimm in their Kinder und Haus Maerchen have improved this simple incident by additional circumstances, will be seen by those who are acquainted with their entire work, or with the extracts from it printed under the title of German Popular Stories. It is given at greater length than in Pasquil's Jests by the author of Tales and Quick Answers, but the main features are the same there as in the Facetia of Poggio, whence it was translated into the Facetie Motti et Burle di diversi Signori et Persone private by Domenichi, so often reprinted. The edition before us is that of Venice, 1565, to which a seventh book was for the first time added. There, as well as in the oldest English authority, the anecdote is attributed to Louis XI. and not to Charles V. as in Pasquil's Jests. The same course was run by other stories and jests found in the two English collections above referred to; and one, "Of the old man that put himself in his son's hands," as it is entitled in Tales and Quick Answers, may be traced in almost every book of the kind from the year 1534 to 1834. It is a fact worth mentioning in connection with this subject, that the notorious Tale of Whittington and his Cat (supposed to be indigenous to this country) is first narrated by the Piovano Arlotto, who died in 1483, and whose Facetie Motti, &c. were collected and printed soon afterwards. It is there given under the following title, Il Piovano a un Prete, che fece mercantia di palle, dice la novella delle gatte, and the hero is represented to have been a merchant of Genoa. The way in which the very oldest of our dramatists have made use of these ancient jest books may be shewn in a single instance. In the Interlude of Thersites, written in 1537, we read the subsequent dialogue between the hero and Vulcan, after the former has required the latter to make a helmet or sallet for him. Vulcan pretends not to understand Thersites, on which he observes, "I mean a sallet, with which men do fight. Mulc. It is a small tasting of a man's might That he should for any matter Fight with a few herbs in a platter. No great laud should follow that victory. Thers. God's passion! Mulciber, where is thy wit and memory? I would have a sallet made of steel. Mulc. Why, Sir, in your stomach long you shall it feel, For steel is hard to digest." The point of this colloquy, such as it is-the play upon the words "sallad" and "sallet "-is contained in one of the jests in The Sackfull of News, which is mentioned by Laneham in his letter from Kenilworth, and which (though no edition older than a century afterwards is now known) had been printed certainly long before 1575, and in all probability prior to 1535. Dismissing, therefore, prose Facetiæ with these few observations, we shall proceed to examine some of the humourous productions in verse which formed part of the library of Mr. Heber, or have elsewhere come under our notice; remarking in the outset that we shall scrupulously avoid the insertion of any thing objectionable on the score of delicacy or propriety. That this will be a task of some difficulty, will be apparent to those who are at all acquainted with the unconstrained manner in which our ancestors thought, and the free language in which they expressed their thoughts. For this reason some productions of a highly amusing kind, and affording curious illustrations of the manners of the time when they were written, must be sealed books to us, or at most can only be glanced at, with the selection of a few passages, affording a very imperfect notion of the nature and contents of the whole. One of these occurs to us at this moment, Jill of Brentford's Testament, a tract of excessive rarity, of which we believe only two copies are known, one at Oxford and the other recently sold. It Iwas written by Robert Copland and printed by William Copland; and the humour of it is of the very broadest description-so broad that we are unable even to allude to the nature of the bequests the old lady is represented to have made to her friends, and especially to the Curate who drew her will, and who might reasonably have expected a more substantial reward for his pains. In his Prologue Copland "the auctor" thus describes his heroine : "At Brentford on the west of London, Nigh to a place that called is Sion; There dwelt a widow of a holy sort, Honest in substance and full of sport. Dally she could with pastime and jests Among her neighbours and her guests. She kept an inn of right good lodging For all estates that thither were coming." Here we must stop, with the more regret, because the production has not, that we remember, been any where examined and criticised. However, we shall be able farther on to find another unobjectionable passage in the Prologue, though from the body of the tract it is impossible, for the reason above stated, to quote a single line. R. Copland goes on to state, that not being able to understand a singular and proverbial phrase he had often heard, he mentioned it to a friend, whom he calls John Hardisay"A merry fellow in each company, Which said, 'Copland, thou lookest dry.' 'The truth.' quoth I, is as you say, For I drank not of all this day;' And of a short tale to make an end, To the Red Lion at the Shambles' end, We went for to drink good ale, Copland asks for an explanation ; and his friend Hardisay (who seems to have been one of our earliest antiquaries and collectors of MSS. and to have delighted in all that was quaint and droll,) professes to have discovered it in "An old scroll, all ragged and rent, That it be of any substance Copland carries the scroll home, reads it, and finds it very entertaining and satirical. The sick widow, with a cup of her own ale in her hand, bequeaths five and twenty ludicrous legacies, besides that to the Curate, to persons of all classes; and after she has concluded, Jill of Brentford exclaims, "What, maid! come hither, I'shrew your neck, Bring us up shortly a quart of seck, leese; [you, I have, as now, no better cheer to make Be merry and welcome, to God I betake you." With these words "the jolly old girl" is supposed to die; and in a "exhortation " concluding Copland entreats his readers to take this little pretty fantasy' "in good part. As we before said, we are sorry to be under the necessity of giving so imperfect an account of it; if we gave more we are sure that our readers would not take "this little pretty fantasy" in good part. The Twelve merry Jests of the Wi dow Edyth are liable to the same objection, though it may not apply to them in the same degree. They are considerably older than Jill of Brentford's Testament, having been first printed by Rastell in 1525; but the edition sold among Mr. Heber's books was that of 1573, " imprinted at London in Fleetlane by Richarde Johnes," but they have not an equal portion of coarse humour. The jests are in fact not so much jokes as impositions and frauds practised by the Widow Edyth upon various persons and in various places. The nature of the tract is stated pretty fully upon the title-page in the following lines: "This lying widow, false and crafty, The name of the author, Walter Smith, is also inserted on the titlepage; and the remark that would occur after a perusal of all the tales, is one of disappointment at the baldness and rudeness of the narrative and at the want of drollery in the incidents. The promise in short is much better than the performance. There is a copy of this edition of the tract in the Selden volume at Oxford; and as no specimen of it has been inserted in bibliographical works, we will present our readers with "The third merry jest: how this Widow Edyth deceived her Host at Horminger, and her Host at Brandon-ferry, and borrowed money of them both; and also of Master Guy, of whom she borrowed four mark. This widow then walked withouten fear For the space fully of six weeks day, Full with good ale, and said he was wel- When he was remembered of his charity. From thence she departed and to Coulme she come, Where with her lies, all and some, In which time one Master Guy, |