Pray, shall we look for an hour or two into the masked balls? Shall we peer at frail Cyprians through the sombre domino? Shall we join the impetuous gallopade, or whirl in the dreamy gyrations of the waltz? Or far better, shall we don opera hat, white cravat and kids, and, with glass at eye, gaze from a box in the Academie Royale de Musique upon the jaleodi Tripoli, danced voluptuously in their native costume, by the first artists from the royal theatre of Madrid? I doubt not that the fagged-out reader, who so kindly has journeyed with me through this day's scenes, will answer, "No." That reader, I trust, will join me in saying that a Sabbath in this metropolis, so far from being set apart as a day of seriousness for its religion, is only set apart as a larger receptacle for its amusements, and that if for six days the rein be freely flung upon the neck of licence, upon the seventh it is cast clean over its head. Paris wants a Luther in 1837, as much as Europe wanted one in the sixteenth century. And suppose the great Reformer, miraculously uprisen from his grave, and unroofed-Paris exhibited to him as an illustration of the progress which the mighty impulse he commenced had made. How vain would seem his noble labours! The Reformation had wrought many worthy things; but Paris moral and Paris religious is as if the Reformation, or any other reformation, had never for a moment been dreamt of. And now were one to address the author of the motto prefixed to this sketch, justly might he say, " Mr. Chevalier, you have at Paris the grandest triumphal arch in the world; you have a lovely Madeleine, a magnificent Bourse, a Louvre thronged with immortal works, a learned Sorbonne, and great literary, scientific, and medical institutions. You have likewise vast military establishments; you have the glorious memory of many victories; you have a classical drama, and, moreover, an epic poem. These things you have, and well may you rejoice in them; but from reverence for truth, if not for its Author, do not also lay claim to religion." SONG OF THE GONDOLIER. BY MOTLEY. HASTE thee o'er the silent waters, Fairest of our island daughters, Now art thou but lightly laden, Wouldst thou bear my gentle maiden, O'er the waves with moonbeams bright, Onward! onward ! 'tis the hour, Gondola, gondola ! This right hand hath double power, O'er the waters wide careering: Know'st thou not her home we're nearing, Gondola, gondola ? I. A. J. In the parlour of the Green Dragon, a public house in the immediate neighbourhood of Westminster Bridge, everybody talks politics, every evening; the great political authority being Mr. Robert Bolton, an individual who defines himself as "a gentleman connected with the press," which is a definition of peculiar indefiniteness. Mr. Robert Bolton's regular circle of admirers and listeners are, an undertaker, a green-grocer, a hair-dresser, a baker, a large stomach surmounted by a man's head, and placed on the top of two particularly short legs, and a thin man in black, name, profession, and pursuit unknown, who always sits in the same position, always displays the same long, vacant face, and never opens his lips, surrounded as he is by most enthusi astic conversation, except to puff forth a volume of tobacco smoke, or give vent to a very snappy, loud, and shrill hem! The conversation sometimes turns upon literature, Mr. Bolton being a literary character; and always upon such news of the day as is exclusively possessed by that talented individual. I found myself of, course accidentally, in the Green Dragon the other evening, and being somewhat amused by the following conversation, preserved it. nesse. -66 "Can you lend me a ten pound note till Christmas?" inquired the hair dresser of the stomach."Where's your security, Mr. Clip ?" "My stock in trade, there's enough of it, I'm thinking, Mr. ThickSome fifty wigs, two poles, half-a-dozen head blocks, and a dead Bruin."- No, I won't then," growled out Thicknesse. lends nothing on the security of the whigs or the Poles either. whigs they're cheats; as for the Poles they've got no cash. I never have nothing to do with blockheads, unless I can't 'awoid it, ironically, and a dead bear's about as much use to me as 1 could be to a dead bear." As for "Well then," urged the other, "there's a book as belonged to Pope, Byron's Poems valued at forty pounds, because it's got Pope's identical scratch on the back,-what do you think of that for security?" "Well, to be sure !" cried the baker; "But how d'ye mean, Mr. Clip ?" "Mean! why, that it 's got the hottergruff of Pope. "Steal not this book, for fear of hangman's rope, All that's written on the inside of the binding of the book :--so, as my son says, we 're bound to believe it." 66 Well, sir," observed the undertaker, deferentially, and in a half whisper, leaning over the table and knocking over the hair-dresser's grog as he spoke; "that argument's very easy upset." "Perhaps, sir," said Clip, a little flurried, "you'll pay for the first upset afore you thinks of another." "Now," said the undertaker, bowing amicably to the hair-dresser, "I think, I says I think,-you'll excuse me, Mr. Clip, I think, you see, that won't go down with the present company,-unfortunately my master had the honour of making the coffin of that ere Lord's housemaid, not no more nor twenty year ago. Don't think I'm proud on it, gentlemen, others might be; but I hate rank of any sort. I've no more respect for a Lord's footman than I have for any respectable tradesman in this room. I may say no more nor I have for Mr. Clip! (bowing.) Therefore, that ere Lord must have been born long after Pope died. And it's a logical interference to defer, that they neither of them lived at the same time. So what I mean is this here, that Pope never had no book, never seed, felt, never smelt no book (triumphantly) as belonged to that ere Lord. And, gentlemen, when I consider how patiently you have 'eared the ideas what I have expressed, I feel bound, as the best way to reward you for the kindness you have exhibited, to sit down without saying anything more,-partickler as I perceive a worthier visitor nor myself is just entered. I am not in the habit of paying compliments, gentlemen,-when I do therefore, I hope I strikes with double force." "Ah! Mr. Murgatroyd! what's all this about, striking with double force?" said the object of the above remark as he entered; "I never excuse a man's getting into a rage during winter, even when he 's seated so close to the fire as you are. What is the cause of this extreme physical and mental excitement, sir?" Such was the very philosophical address of Mr. Robert Bolton, a shorthand-writer, as he termed himself,-a bit of equivoque passing current among his fraternity, which must give the uninitiated a vast idea of the establishment of the ministerial organ, while to the initiated it signifies, that no one paper can lay claim to the en joyment of their services. Mr. Bolton was a young man, with a somewhat sickly and very disssipated expression of countenance. His habiliments were composed of an exquisite union of gentility, slovenliness, assumption, simplicity, newness, and old age. Half of him was dressed for the winter, the other half for the summer. His hat was of the newest cut, the D'Orsay :-his trousers had been white, but the inroads of mud and ink, &c. had given them a piebald appearance,―round his throat he wore a very high black cravat, of the most tyrannical stiffness, while his tout ensemble was hidden beneath the enormous folds of an old brown poodle-collared great coat, which was closely buttoned up to the aforesaid cravat. His fingers peeped through the ends of his black kid gloves, and two of the toes of each foot took a similar view of society through the extremities of his high-lows. Sacred to the bare walls of his garret be the mysteries of his interior dress! He was a short, spare man, of a somewhat inferior deportment. Everybody seemed influenced by his entry into the room, and his salutation of each member partook of the patronizing. The hair-dresser made way for him between himself and the stomach. A minute afterwards he had taken possession of his pint and pipe. A pause in the conversation took place. Every body was waiting, anxious for his first observation. "Horrid murder in Westminster this morning," observed Mr. Bolton. Everybody changed their positions. All eyes were fixed upon the man of paragraphs. "A baker murdered his son by boiling him in a copper," said Mr. Bolton. "Good heavens !" exclaimed everybody in simultaneous horror. "Boiled him, gentlemen!" added Mr. Bolton with the most effective emphasis, "boiled him." "And the particulars, Mr. B.," inquired the hair-dresser, “the particulars?" Mr. Bolton took a very long draught of porter, and some two or three dozen whiffs of tobacco, doubtless to instill into the commercial capacities of the company the superiority of a gentleman connected with the press, and then said, "The man was a baker gentlemen. Every one looked at the baker present, who stared at Bolton. His victim, being his son, also was necessarily the son of a baker. The wretched murderer had a wifc, whom he was frequently in the habit, while in an intoxicated state, of kicking, pummelling, flinging mugs at, knocking down, and half-killing while in bed, by inserting in her mouth a considerable portion of a sheet or blanket." The speaker took another draught, everybody looked at everybody else, and exclaimed "Horrid !" "It appears in evidence, gentlemen," continued Mr. Bolton, "that on the evening of yesterday, Sawyer the baker came home in a reprehensible state of beer. Mrs. S. connubially considerate, carried him in that condition up stairs into his chamber, and consigned him to their mutual couch. In a minute or two she lay sleeping beside the man whom the morrow's dawn beheld a murderer! (Entire silence informed the reporter that his picture had attained the awful effect he desired). The son came home about an hour afterwards, opened the door, and went up to bed. Scarcely,-(gentlemen, conceive his feelings of alarm,) scarcely had he taken off his indescribables when shrieks to his experienced ear maternal shrieks, scared the silence of surrounding night. He put his indescribables on again, and ran down stairs. He opened the door of the parental bed-chamber. His father was dancing upon his mother. What must have been his feelings! In the agony of the minute he rushed at his male parent as he was about to plunge a knife into the side of his female. The mother shrieked. The father caught the son (who had wrested the knife from the paternal grasp) up in his arms, carried him down stairs, shoved him into a copper of boiling water among some linen, closed the lid, and jumped upon the top of it, in which position he was found with a ferocious countenance by the mother, who arrived in the melancholy wash-house just as he had so settled himself. Where's my boy!' shrieked the mother. 'In that copper, boiling,' coolly replied the benign father. Struck by the awful intelligence, the mother rushed from the house and alarmed the neighbourhood. The police entered a minute afterwards. The father having bolted the wash-house door, had bolted himself. They dragged the lifeless body of the boiled baker from the cauldron, and with a promptitude commendable in men of their station, they immediately carried it to the station-house. Subsequently the baker was apprehended while seated on the top of a lamp-post in Parliament-Street, lighting his pipe." The whole horrible ideality of the Mysteries of Udolpho, condensed into the pithy effect of a ten-line paragraph, could not possibly have so affected the narrator's auditory. Silence, the purest and most noble of all kinds of applause, bore ample testimony to the barbarity of the baker, as well as to Bolton's knack of narration, and it was only broken after some minutes had elapsed, by interjectional expressions of the intense indignation of every man present. The baker wondered how a British baker could so disgrace himself and BARNEY MAGUIRE'S HISTORY OF THE CORONATION. 207 the highly honourable calling to which he belonged; and the others indulged in a variety of wonderments connected with the subject; among which, not the least wonderment was that which was awakened by the genius and information of Mr. Robert Bolton, who after a glowing eulogium on himself, and his unspeakable influence with the daily press, was proceeding with a most solemn countenance to hear the pros and cons of the Pope autograph question, when I took up my hat and left. MR. BARNEY MAGUIRE'S HISTORY OF THE CORONATION. Air-"The Groves of Blarney." Och! the Coronation! what celebration And the Duke of Leinster, all in order did repair ! And the Lords and Ladies, and the Miss O'Gradys Their pillows scorning, that self-same morning, With Giniral Dullbeak.-Och! 'twas mighty fine To see how asy bould Corporal Casey With his swoord drawn, prancing, made them kape the line. Then the Guns alarums, and the King of Arums, And Wellington walking with his swoord drawn, talking And Sir De Lacy, and the Duke Dalmasey, They call'd him Sowlt afore he changed his name, Then the Noble Prussians, likewise the Russians, ut Lord Brougham was missing, and gone a fishing, |