Pamph. Philost. Pamph. Philost. Are half so sweet as tender human words. These rival youths were friends; When his rival left Ho! I see it all. Let's know the rest. Emilia. Neiph. Philost. Emilia. 'Twas as yon jester says. One night, the Pavian (warn'd Peace!-He stood Like flaming anger in the ravisher's path: Pamph. Emilia. Philost. Philost. Dion. Neiph. Neiph. And, drawing forth his sword, he bade him hail! What did the other? And for each blow repaid him with a wound. The end? the end? The end was (would 'twere better) such as happens And by a story which Certaldo told (All well confirm'd) that Agatha was, in truth, And so Guidotto won, and there's an end? Was known thereafter. In the caves he lived, In some lone cemetry, Over whose scarce-seen mounds the pine-tree sheds He sleeps in quiet. Had he no friend?—Oh! yes. And all sad friends of Death were friends to him! No more. My tale is told. Then let us go unto the river banks And rest awhile under yon plane-tree's shade. And with a song, where love shall sweeten wisdom, What can be heard, save music?-Follow me! [Exeunt.] OPINIONS FOR 1826. "A plague of opinion; a man may wear it of both sides, like a leather jerkin.” Troil, and Cress. So, there's an end of 1825; and all its great and glorious transactions, released from the legal tutelage of attorneys-general and prerogative judges, are now nothing more than mere matter of history! What a world of superfine legislation, and of three-piled diplomacy are gone to the tomb of all the Capulets! what a victorious war in the East! what a tremendous fire in the West! what a magnificent voyage of discovery in the North! what a clever mining speculation in the South! all as completely gone and over, as the times of Alexander the Great; and all too merely for the better filling up of another volume of the Annual Register, for the further multiplication of parliamentary proceedings, and for the addition of another library of Term Reports to the Pelion upon Ossa of law, which already has been cast upon the head of common sense, overlaying, like a drunken nurse, the babe it was meant to cherish. A consummation this devoutly to be wished, no doubt; but where in the name of Heaven is the matter to stop? Is this affair of the press to be an interminable war between time and space, and are the records of man to go on accumulating, till books shall leave no room for readers in existence? Two new novels and a threatened Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, exclusive of the cock-boat publications in the wake of the great three-decker, are a large dose of fictitious history, for one poor year, and from one pair of hands; and then for the genuine, not only is the world grown larger, and a hundred new republics in atl and ala daily arising to struggle and to fight. for the honour of "pleasing the Athenians," but the "hauts faits et gestes" of the old nations are now written in duplicate; so that the man who has read only one side the question, knows as little of what has been doing as the best astronomer knows what is going on on the other side of the moon. Every new publication brings with it its train of refutations, rejoinders, and replies; and to read one book of the church, begets the necessity of perusing a whole shelf of the books of other churches, before you can tell on which side truth is not: while rival generals fight duels, to ascertain dates and positions, and write their memoirs, as the Irish magistrate did his reports, "with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other." Then what, I pray you, are the extenuations of gold-beating, or what the marvels we hear of incommensurable lengths of cotton-twist daily spun by our steam-engines, to the greater extension of Catholic and Anti-catholic orations, the symposiacal forth-pourings of gratitude, from commemorated churchwardens, and eulogized committee-men, the long-winded promises of speculating joint-stock directors, and the equally sincere addresses of candidates for election? Yet what are even these, to the immenser masses of divinity, polemical and doctrinal, tracts, sermons, exhortations and expositions, of all sects and calibres, from orthodoxy to Thomas Mulock, and of every stretch of credulity, from the conclave at Rome, to the apostles of Joanna Southcott: not to mention the cholera morbus scribendi of the other learned and babbling professions. Surely the possible combinations of language must soon be exhausted; and a merciful dispensation it is that the alphabet should admit of no more. But, to return from this digression: 1825 is gone" ad plures,” which I shall take the liberty of translating, "to the printers." But thank Heaven, we are in no want of a new year to succeed it ;—a happy new year may it prove to us all! Do not, however, be alarmed, my good Sir, this is no plot to entrap you into reading a monody to the memory of the deceased, nor to draw down upon you a common-place morality of the world's vanity and flight of time. If your own growing aches and asthmas, your stiffening joints and relaxing sinews do not inform you that you are not quite as young as in the days of good King George the Third, I scorn to be the person to put you in mind of the circumstance. Let those regret the past, who never anticipate the future: for my part, I am too much in the habit of wishing that "this time were come," and "that time were over," not to be ashamed of reproaching "the creeping and inaudible foot" of the knight of the hour-glass, with stealing a march upon me. No, no, I should as soon think of lingering, like our good neighbours the Irish, over the chronicles of Eri, or regretting the glorious memory of Bryan Borohoime and his green flag and his golden harp, as cast one sigh of sorrow after the worthless runaway 1825. What indeed has 1825 done to be recalled with any expression of regret? What has liberty, what has reason gained by its efforts? Is it because the Blacks of Hayti have bought their freedom, after having conquered it, or because the Brasilians have negotiated their emancipation from the mother country, that we are to veil our bonnets to 1825? Or is 1825 to be lauded for the chivalry of military marquesses, or piety of royal dukes, in echo of the hoarse croakings of the enemies to liberty of conscience? Ask the Spaniards what is their opinion of 1825, or the Greeks, or the Italians; or ask the poor down-trodden, priest-ridden French what they think of Frassynous and 1825? I fancy they will all be in the same story; so no more of 1825 for me. "Forward" is the word: let us see what is to be done" in the coming on of time ;" and so, "all hail" 1826. Withthe blessing of Providence we will, my good readers, have another jogtrot together through the ensuing twelve months of the New Monthly, as we have had many a good one through the preceding volumes; and I modestly hope as much to your satisfaction as my own. To this end, my first care shall be directed to the selection of topics, so as to avoid touching upon "the raw" of your very tender consciences, or treading upon the corns of an inveterate prejudice: for, truth to tell, the readers of this generation are somewhat delicate in this matter; and are much too apt to start off and away from any opinion that is by half a comma too flat or too sharp for the concert-pitch of established belief. A rope-dancer is not obliged to poise his pole with more assiduous attention to avoid a fall, than the editor of a journal is to weigh his matter by the standard of his readers' notions, if he means to keep up his sale. The Quarterly Review is not so hard on a republican traveller in America, nor Southey so severe on a catholic or a dissenter, as the public is on a journalist who presumes to be wiser or better than the community he addresses. This, too, is the more severe, because (under favour be it spoken) the said public does not at all times seem perfectly aware of what it thinks it is thinking upon certain subjects; and is very apt to run down the identical opinions which, a few months back, it applauded to the very echo. Not that this is altogether without its convenience: for as there can be no progression without change, so it may be hoped that in these frequent variations of sentiment, folks may sometimes stumble on the truth; and that so Champfort's cynical and sweeping aphorism against all popular doctrines, may sometimes meet with an exception. Besides, if the public should at last definitively make up its mind to the true and becoming, and should continue in that happy state of determination— were it only for a twelve-month-it would very materially cramp the genius of essayists, and make a sensible diminution from the stock of the "innocent amusement of nations." On these and some other accounts I am content to take things as I find them; and in the exercise of a ticklish discretion, to set off the gratification of vanity in success against the discomfort of an occasional failure; reserving to myself, however, the right of redeeming the hazardous opinion of to-day by a double dose of fashionable cant to-morrow, after the most approved models of the see-saw philosophy. All I ask of an admiring public is just so much consistency as will serve me to steer by, and will save my dear countrymen from Falstaff's reproach of being "neither fish nor flesh," so "that no man knows where to have them.' At the outset of this paper I had some thoughts of making the matter intelligible to the reader, by drawing up a short abstract of his more recent hallucinations, somewhat as the man in the Tatler, who drew together a company of cursers and swearers, wrote down their conversation to demonstrate the jargon of idle expletives with which they interwove their dialogue; and such a 66 catalogue raisonnée" (if the term be not a bull) would, I fancy, surprise us not a little. But upon second thoughts, this does not seem quite fair usage of a very liberal customer and patron. What man, indeed, could bear thus to have All his thoughts observed, Set in a note-book, learned and conned by rote, To cast into his teeth. However, if any one be curious in this particular, let him read a file of the Times newspaper for the last ten years, and he will have a tolerable abstract of popular opinions during that period. But there is a point of much more importance to us, and that is the present, the actual now, in which we live and write and have our being. The public for the time being are, by virtue of office, always right; and it is with them, and not with their predecessors, that we journalists have to do (scribere enim est agere). It may therefore be worth while at this commencement of a new year for us to balance accounts with our readers, and, in the trader's phrase, to " take stock;" which is, in plain English, to make an inventory of the opinions that may be employed in our commerce with the public for the next twelve months, or at least till a new ukase of the empire shall alter the existing fashions in the national modes of thought. Indeed I have often wondered that the "leading critical periodicals," as they are called, have not substituted such a catalogue of statutable opinions, in the place of their very useless list of new publications. Like the Emperor of Austria's catechism, it would supersede whole tomes of ethics and political philosophy. Among party writers, whose motto is " Nulle n'aura d'esprit, hors nous et nos amis," the labours of constructing such a catalogue would not be |