Imitators. During the twenty years following the death of Johnson, I remember several persons resembling him in appearance, and who aped his manner, and, as I have been told, correctly copied his speech. And I have observed this throughout my life to be a national peculiarity, that either at the time of a great man's popularity, or just after his death, many persons bearing naturally considerable resemblance to the illustrious one suddenly appear, and by dint of application actually acquire a tone of speaking, and perhaps even of thought, in accordance with their prototype. How many Byrons and Cannings-curled lips, high foreheads, and allcan you not call to mind, reader, amid your own observings during the last dozen years? It always was, and I presume always will be so-man is a mimicking animal. Abbott returning Thanks. At one of the Garrick Club dinners, amid other toasts, "The Dramatists of the Day" was proposed very late in the evening; there were on'y one or two persons who had written for the stage present. Abbott, after a pause, rose, and said, "Gentlemen, allow me to return my thanks as one, and on behalf, of a very large class of dramatists, I having had a farce damn'd last season." Elliston was infected with the speech-making mania, which had previously been the peculiarity of Palmer. Robert William was never so happy as when it became necessary to "address the house." When Mrs. Bland, then labouring under mental imbecility, took a benefit at Drury, he, deeming it requisite to be oratorical and pathetic, made a long and not very successful speech, and was working up his energies to conclude with a magnificent clunax, which came off as follows:-" For your kindness to her this night, ladies and gentlemen, she will bless you! her children will bless you! heaven will bless!" the voice rising at each exclamation, and after a great effort, " I WILL BLESS You!" A roar of laughter was the orator's reward. Barrington (the Pickpocket) and Mrs. Siddons.-One York assizes, after the auditors had left the theatre, Mrs. Siddons, who had only to go from thence to the Black Swan in Coney-street, was waiting with her female friend at the stage-door for Mr. Siddons to escort them home. A gentleman of elegant appearance was waiting opposite the house, and observing Mrs. Siddons, crossed over, and addressing her by name, said, he feared she might be endangered by the cold, and begged her to excuse him for requesting to forget he was a stranger, and with her friend accept his escort to her lodgings. Mrs. Siddons was a woman of too good principles to have any affectations: she accepted the arm of the stranger, and as she was going homewards remarked, that what made her more timorous was the fact of hearing that Barrington the pickpocket was in the town. The gentleman saw Mrs. Siddons and friend to her door, and putting the latter in first, detained Mrs. Siddons one second whilst she begged to know his name at least, as he positively refused to walk in. My dear madam," he said, "pray be under no apprehension wherever you are about Barrington; he will never injure you; good night, Madam-I am Barrington." He bowed, and was out of sight in a moment. He went wherever Mrs. Siddons was engaged as a star; the crowds attracted by her acting favouring his depredations, which were always committed upon those he sat next in the box. He was ultimately taken at Newcastle theatre whilst Mrs. Siddons was acting, and identified by Mr. Stephen Kemble the then manager; he that night robbed a Catholic Priest of a gold watch. This was his last essay, he then " " Left his country for his country's good." It was a clear, cool, calm evening in the month of April-an Irish April-that weeps more and smiles less than an English one;-the grass was of a brilliant greenery, such as hath won for my poor country the title of "Emerald Isle; " and its brightness was increased by those judicious contrasts in which nature so much delights. The meadows at either side of the lane, leading to the Red-Gap, were starred with daises, white and pearl-like, their petals spreading around their yellow eyes that gazed upwards, delighting in the rays of the sun which had called them into existence; -yellow tufts of laughing butter-cups stood up with greater pretention than their snowy neighbours, inasmuch as they might be some half-inch taller, a distinction in which they vainly gloried. The lesser celandine opened millions of its blossoms beneath the sheltered thickets of the golden furze; and though you saw them not, you felt that violets were here-even, as a poet, new amongst us, sings, where "the earth Sends up a pleasant smell, and the dry leaves There were thousands of those flowers along the broken hedge-rows that skirted the narrow lane, and you might see, if at all acquainted with the localities of the place, where the tall green herbs mingled, in all the varieties of fern and robin-run-the-hedge, with the pale cowslip and broad-leaved primrose; you might see, too, just by holding back that wreath of wild plum blossom, the cunning nest of the yellow-hammer, with its pale purple eggs; or still more interesting, the dear robin's domicile, known by the brown withered leaves which he piles around him, doubtless to remind the prying school-boy of his long and much lauded labour for the babes of the wood. In England the fame of that good deed is his shield and buckler, but in Ireland we have a holier legend :-When our Saviour was suffering, the robin, it is said, hovered near the cross to manifest his affection and duty to the Son of God; he kept close to him unto the end, and when the Lord's side was pierced, some of the holy blood sprinkled the robin's breast, and the precious symbol was permitted to remain thereon as a record of his fidelity. There are but few forest-trees in this my landscape; two only, stunted ones, yonder, still quite bare of leaf; but in the tallest there is a magpie's nest, like a huge cone of thorns, and the airy monkey-birds, its proprietors, are, brim full of mischief, careering and scamping over fields and meadows, and frequently disputing with the Bocher's solitary pig his meal of potatoes. It is impossible justly to describe the freshness of that evening hour, as two young girls met at the commencement of the lane we have endeavoured briefly to mark out. One came over a stile leading from the opposite side of the road, and her rosy feet were moistened with the dew upon * Lame man. May. VOL. XLIV. NO. CLXXIII. G which she had been treading. The maiden was brown and comely, with a bright black eye, and a smiling lip; her linsey-woolsey petticoat was rather of the shortest, but her bosom was carefully shrouded by a kerchief of crimson silk, which lent a still deeper hue to the already bright colour of her round and dimpled cheeks. She bounded across the road towards a tall delicate girl, whose deportment was more grave, more placid, rather, than her own, and, in a voice somewhat of the loudest, exclaimed "Well, Miss Ally-there you are before me after all; now if that isn't always the way with your quiet asy-going girls; when they take on, they are ever up to the most mischief-as pleasant as a summer's Sunday when nobody's thinking of it; - but Alice, darlint! what ails you now? why you've been crying!-and nobody ever had luck or grace who went to the Bocher of the Red-Gap with a wet cheek.” The person the lively Ellen Boyle addressed was evidently of a rank superior to her own-not exactly a lady, but something between the peasant and absolute gentility-the daughter of a gentleman farmer-of one who was a farmer among gentlemen, and a gentleman among farmers-who endeavoured to cope with his betters who despised himand who was courted by his equals whom he affected to despise; -in a word, stiff Tom Dizney was a keen impudent Irishman, in whom there was an exaggeration both of the faults and the perfections which are supposed to be the birth-right (and, to coin a word, the birth-curse) of his countrymen. Alice was his only child; and as his wife died in giving her birth, she was committed to the fosterage of Ellen Boyle's mother, who performed her duty admirably, and bestowed almost as much affection upon Alice Dizney as upon her own turbulent, troublesome daughter, whom she declared, in the bitterness of her heart, "rolicked the life out of the country, and never picked up a morsel of gentility from the darlint foster-sister, who, with all her beauty and all her goodness, was as mild as new milk, and a pattern to rich and poor on account of her behaviour." Ellen laughed at her mother and at all besides, and, sooth to say, appeared steady to no one thing except her affection for "Miss Alice," for whom she was ready at any time to sacrifice all her whims and caprices, and indeed they were not a few. "Did you wait long, Miss Alice?" "No, Ellen, not long; and yet I think I must have been here some time, too, for the sun is sinking-is almost sunk-and when I came he was-there." "Not there, I am sure, Miss, honey-that's where he was when I took my father's dinner at twelve o'clock." "Well, then, there, yonder, where the light white cloud is coming over the blue, as trouble comes over our contentment." "If all throuble, darlint, was as quick and away as that white cloud, it's small need somebody would have of going to somebody this blessed evening; but I'm sartin it's two long hours since the sun was there- for when it was" "Well, Ellen" "There isn't an hour's climb that sun can make but I know it by my work;-I could set it right if it went wrong, God bless it-at five to turn in Machree, and at six to milk her." "What, Ellen, occupy a whole hour in turning Machree into the bawn before you milk her?-you shall never be my milk-maid." " I didn't say, did I, I was all that time turning her in?" "Not exactly; but I concluded as much, by your saying you did not milk till six." "Ah, Miss, jewell!-what time have I for a little discourse withyou know who!-but betwixt times?-the driving in of Machree, and the milking-just at the far corner near the bohreen, where the limetree grows green, and I get such fine blackberries for my little brother" "At this season, Ellen?" "Ah, don't be too hard upon us entirely, and you with a bachelor of your own-or at father's dinner time-indeed you need not laugh;ever since I hurt my arm helping widow Brady to bind her brestnaugh*, I hav'nt the strength of an infant in it; and the boy only comes to carry father's dinner to him by reason of my poor arm-sorra a taste of pity mother has for it. Ah, Miss Ally, it's well for you-you have no mother to bother and hinder ye at every hand's turn as mine does me "Now do I pray God," interrupted Alice Dizney, with a sudden burst of feeling much at variance with her usual gentleness, "that he has not heard the saying you have just said in your foolishness, Ellen; for sure the penance would be hard that could take it out. Well for me, is it, that I have no mother!-well for me that I have no one to teach me as a woman what I am to think and do! - well for me that no mother's kiss ever blessed my lips!-well for me that no mother's prayer ever whispered its way to God's throne for me in health or in sickness!-well for me that there is no mother's eye to look over the common or down the lane to see if I am coming!-well for me that there is no mother's ear to listen, and, among the tramp of many feet, to hear only her child's!-well for me that, with a hard, though maybe kind-hearted father, I am alone in my own counthry!-and if I were to die, (which who knows but I may, and soon?) is it well for me, Ellen, that a strange hand should fasten my shroud, and that my body would be laid in the cold clay without a mother's tear ?" Poor Ellen was terrified, like a child that runs from the peal its own hands have set ringing. Although she loved her foster-sister she could not understand her; and now she only felt that she had done wrong, very wrong, and yielding to the impulse of her affectionate heart, she flung herself on her knees and exclaimed, "Oh, Miss Alice! alone in your counthry, with your fine man of a father, and the farm, and you the first fortune in the parish, only Miss Jeffers that 's not to be named the one time with you, to say nothing of my craythur of a mother who lives upon your breath, nor myself, who'd die every day ten times over, morning, noon, or night, to bring the colour to ye'r cheek, or the cheerful bate in your heart, and you to say that you're alone in your country! Oh, take back the word, darling, or my bosom will burst open with the sorrow to think of your even'en death to yourself, and ye looking such a beauty entirely in that blue moreno that Miss Jeffers wanted to say was English 'till I taught * Bundle of Sticks. G2 her the differ. Oh hould up your heart, if it was only for the sake of him!"-and Ellen, with admirable tact, which after all is nothing more than the essence of kindliness flavoured by a little art, seized the hand which hung listlessly amid the folds of the "blue moreno," and pressed her finger upon a thin plaiting of gold, a simple ring which girded the fair Alice's finger. The mute appeal produced some effect: the fair girl raised her hand,-gazed wistfully on the token, sighed, shook her head, and then, without another word, proceeded down RedGap Lane towards the Bocher's dwelling. No silent fairy presided at Ellen's birth. She could not hold her tongue, could not understand tranquillity; and, while Alice walked quietly along, she kept up a sort of running chatter; or, rather, talked to herself, or to anything she encountered, animate or inanimate. Her spirits were perpetually bubbling up,-boiling over, and she could not command them. Her foster-sister's taciturnity was a matter both of annoyance and condolence to her, and, after in vain endeavouring to draw her into conversation, she would exclaim, "Hey, my grief! Miss Allice, honey, it's a mortal pity you can't rouse ye'r heart up like, instead of letting it be down so. Well, to be sure, if there isn't the very same ould hare the Bocher tamed the year of the hard frost! I'd lay anything, for all his hopping so careless there in the clover, he's been down yon at the ould man's parsley which he keeps a-purpose for his bit rabbits. Sure it's the world's wonder the dale of small live things he has about his cabin. And sure that's the wonderful cabin, a wonder in itself as a body may say: every morsel of wood in it (and it's as good as all wood, claubered over with mud) is from the wild sea-drift pieces of boords from foreign parts that he gathered himself from along the sea-shore after a storm and wrecks, and the like, and then builded them into a house; and I heard that the very mud of the walls he sprinkled with holy-water, which was a sin to be sure, though the priest didn't heed it. He's a wonderful man entirely that same Bocher; and has more skill than 'ere a fairy man in the three counties; and more skill in cows, and tossing cups, and reading stars than 'ere another; and a surprising hand at taming horses : almost as good as "the Whisperer" that you couldn't but hear tell of, that went into the stable with Major Claper's horse, Lightning, that no man ever put saddle on; and, having fastened the door and everybody out, whispered one or two sacrets into the animal's ear, which set the baste a trembling, and in a lather of foam, so that the horse that went in a devil came out a saint, and, what's more wonderful, never turned devil again, -only like a lamb for innocence and play." "And what were the secrets?" inquired Alice, half-roused to attention by the mention of a very extraordinary person, whose power of taming the fiercest horse, without any apparent coercion, and that within a very limited space of time, was well known throughout Ireland; "and what were the secrets?" "Ah! catch a weazel asleep," laughed Ellen, delighted that the spell seemed broken when the silent spoke-" Catch a weazel asleep! he was as careful, maybe more careful, of his secrets than even young ladies of their love; he was close-mouthed, and, barring the horses, never let on to any living mortal what the secret was; sure it's buried with him in the grave now, where it will remain. Well, Miss Alice, I |