to tremble under him- he hung rather backwards, and, as I pulled at his halter, it broke in my hand. sive in my face: 'Don't thrash me with it; may.' If I do,' said I, I'll be d

He looked up penbut if you will you

A critic who refuses to see in this charming description wit, humor, pathos, a kind nature speaking, and a real sentiment, must be hard indeed to move and to please. A page or two farther we come to a description not less beautiful a landscape and figures, deliciously painted by one who had the keenest enjoyment and the most tremulous sensibility :

6

""Twas in the road between Nismes and Lunel, where is the best Muscatto wine in all France: the sun was set, they had done their work: the nymphs had tied up their hair afresh, and the swains were preparing for a carousal. My mule made a dead point. 'Tis the pipe and tambourine,' said I —‘I never will argue a point with one of your family as long as I live; so leaping off his back, and kicking off one boot into this ditch and t'other into that, I'll take a dance,' said I, 'so stay you here.'

A sunburnt daughter of labor rose up from the group to meet me as I advanced towards them; her hair, which was of a dark chestnut approaching to a black, was tied up in a knot, all but a single tress.

"We want a cavalier,' said she, holding out both her hands, as if to offer them. 'And a cavalier you shall have,' said I, taking hold of both of them. We could not have done without you,' said she, letting go one hand, with selftaught politeness, and leading me up with the other.

"A lame youth, whom Apollo had recompensed with a pipe, and to which he had added a tambourine of his own accord, ran sweetly over the prelude, as he sat upon the bank. 'Tie me up this tress instantly,' said Nannette, putting a piece of string into my hand. It taught me to forget I was a stranger. The whole knot fell down- we had been seven years acquainted. The youth struck the note upon the tambourine, his pipe followed, and off we bounded.

The sister of the youth who had stolen her voice from heaven sang alternately with her brother. 'Twas a Gascoigne roundelay: Viva la joia, fidon la tristessa.' The nymphs joined in unison, and their swains an octave below them.

eyes.

"Viva la joia was in Nannette's lips, viva la joia in her A transient spark of amity shot across the space betwixt us. She looked amiable. Why could I not live and end my days thus? 'Just Disposer of our joys and sorrows!'

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cried I, why could not a man sit down in the lap of content here, and dance, and sing, and say his prayers, and go to heaven with this nut-brown maid?' Capriciously did she bend her head on one side, and dance up insidious. 'Then 'tis time

to dance off,' quoth I."

And with this pretty dance and chorus, the volume artfully concludes. Even here one can't give the whole description. There is not a page in Sterne's writing but has something that were better away, a latent corruption a hint as of an impure presence.*

Some of that dreary double entendre may be attributed to freer times and manners than ours, but not all. The foul Satyr's eyes leer out of the leaves constantly: the last words the famous author wrote were bad and wicked- the last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon. I think of these past writers and of one who lives amongst us now, and am grateful for the innocent laughter and the sweet and unsullied page which the author of "David Copperfield" gives to my children.

* "With regard to Sterne, and the charge of licentiousness which presses so seriously upon his character as a writer, I would remark that there is a sort of knowingness, the wit of which depends, 1st, on the modesty it gives pain to; or, 2ndly, on the innocence and innocent ignorance over which it triumphs; or, 3rdly, on a certain oscillation in the individual's own mind between the remaining good and the encroaching evil of his nature- -a sort of dallying with the devil-a fluxionary art of combining courage and cowardice, as when a man snuffs a candle with his fingers for the first time, or better still, perhaps, like that trembling daring with which a child touches a hot tea-urn, because it has been forbidden; so that the mind has its own white and black angel; the same or similar amusement as may be supposed to take place between an old debauchee and a prude the feeling resentment on the one hand, from a prudential anxiety to preserve appearances and have a character; and, on the other, an inward sympathy with the enemy. We have only to suppose society innocent, and then nine-tenths of this sort of wit would be like a stone that falls in snow, making no sound, because exciting no resistance; the remainder rests on its being an offence against the good manners of human nature itself.

"This source, unworthy as it is, may doubtless be combined with wit, drollery, fancy, and even humor; and we have only to regret the misalliance; but that the latter are quite distinct from the former, may be made evident by abstracting in our imagination the morality of the characters of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, and Trim, which are all antagonists to this spurious sort of wit, from the rest of Tristram Shandy,' and by supposing, instead of them, the presence of two or three callous debauchees. The result will be pure disgust. Sterne cannot be too severely censured for thus using the best dispositions of our nature as the panders and condiments for the basest.". COLERIDGE: Literary Remains, vol. i. pp. 141, 142.

"Jeté sur cette boule,
Laid, chétif et souffrant;
Etouffé dans la foule,
Faute d'être assez grand:

"Une plainte touchante

De ma bouche. sortit.

Le bon Dieu me dit: Chante,
Chante, pauvre petit!

"Chanter, ou je m'abuse,
Est ma tâche ici bas.

Toux ceux qu'ainsi j'amuse,
Ne m'aimeront-ils pas ?"

In those charming lines of Béranger, one may fancy described the career, the sufferings, the genius, the gentle nature of GOLDSMITH, and the esteem in which we hold him. Who, of the millions whom he has amused, doesn't love him? To be the most beloved of English writers, what a title that is for a man! * A wild youth, wayward, but full of tenderness and affection, quits the country village where his boyhood has been passed in happy musing, in idle shelter, in fond longing to see the great world out of doors, and achieve name and fortune; and after years of dire struggle, and neglect and poverty, his heart turning back as fondly to his native place as it had longed eagerly for change when sheltered there, he writes a book and a poem, full of the recollections and feelings of home : he paints the friends and scenes of his youth, and peoples Auburn and Wakefield with remembrances of Lissoy. Wander he must, but he carries away a home-relic with him, and dies Iwith it on his breast. His nature is truant; in repose it longs for change as on the journey it looks back for friends and quiet. He passes to-day in building an air-castle for to-morrow, or in writing yesterday's elegy; and he would fly away this hour, but that a cage and necessity keep him. What is the charm of his verse, of his style, and humor? His sweet

"He was a friend to virtue, and in his most playful pages never forgets what is due to it. A gentleness, delicacy, and purity of feeling distinguishes whatever he wrote, and bears a correspondence to the generosity of a disposition which knew no bounds but his last guinea.

"The admirable ease and grace of the narrative, as well as the pleasing truth with which the principal characters are designed, make the Vicar of Wakefield' one of the most delicious morsels of fictitious composition on which the human mind was ever employed.

We read the 'Vicar of Wakefield' in youth and in age -we return to it again and again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature."-SIR WALTER SCOTT.