in the "Story of Rimini." Noble as those theories are, let me hope that they may never be carried into practice. Let me hope that wives may continue to love their husbands, and to remain faithful to their bed, though they may chance to see finer men at church and market,-that a holier power guards the sanctity of the marriage-couch, than whim, fancy, caprice, passion, and shameless desire,-that execration and hatred shall for ever pursue the memory of the unprincipled adultress, that instead of flowers being sprinkled, and annual hymns chaunted over the mingled dust of incestuous paramours, weeds may grow there, and toads undisturbed engender; and that all low-minded and paltry men, who, in folly, or in wickedness, shall seek, like Leigh Hunt, to versify vice into virtue, may meet with some just infliction, as severe as that which makes him at this moment to wince, wail, and tremble, and in his heart to feel all the agonies of remorse, without the softening of repentance, at having dedicated to a licentious muse the prison-hours that were doomed to be the punishment of his sedition.

But it seems that Leigh Hunt now denies having had any thing to do with these pot-valiant denunciations of vengeance against Z. You sat still and silent,

"As the female dove,

Or ere her golden couplets are disclosed," You are still "he of the rose and the violet,"

"A fool of sweetness, crispness, ease, Compound of lovely smallnesses." But your brother, who appears to be the drudge at the printing-office in town, while your Majesty resides at Hampstead, was, you say, the oracle on that occasion. Really the King of the Cockneys must himself be sensible of the imprudence of Prince John. That unhappy prince must needs have two separate readings of his creed. He calls upon Z. to come forward with his name, and declares him to be a coward for withholding it, though all that Z. did was to expose the wickedness of an immoral poem. By and by the Examiner publishes, with high praise and commendation, a letter to Mr Canning, which, whatever may be its character as a literary composition, is, beyond doubt, the most malignant and fiendish curse ever uttered by one hu

man being against another, and concludes with a threat of assassination, either idiotically unmeaning, or sa vagely wicked. Prince John is in high glee at the sarcasms of this lurking assassin; he delights to think that Mr Canning allowed himself to be disturbed by them; a single unguarded expression of an animated orator, during the warmth of discussion, is judged by him worthy of death and a conjuration of murderers; for the sake of one word, an accomplished gentleman, rhetorician, scholar, and poet, ought, according to this moralist, to be outlawed from human society, and denied the common attributes of a human being; and, at the fancied idea of his humiliation, a shout is raised by the royal brothers, that shakes the whole kingdom of Cockney, from Lisson Grove to No 18, Catherine Street, Strand.

Your Majesty seems to be sensible of the extraordinary style of your royal edicts, and you seek to preserve your own consistency by the sacrifice of Prince John. How hard the hearts of kings! There, alas, generosity is not to be found. You, forsooth, think, that the author of the letter to Mr Canning ought to come forward ; though you also think, that he may have good reason for not doing so; and with these clashing opinions of your own, you give your royal brother a sort of awkward lecture on his absurd and contending principles. But still you admire the author of the letterhint that he is your friend-and the friend of man-talk of enduring " petrefaction" before you disclose his name

breathe not a syllable of displeasure with his ferocity and avowed determination, under supposeable circumstances, to commit murder-and delight in the universal odium against Mr Canning, which, according to you, his atrocious epistle has excited.

Prince John can have no hopes of the succession, for you have often told the world, that your throne is surrounded by a numerous progeny, but you ought to drill him into the appearance of consistency with himself and his elder brother; so that he may not drive you into the necessity of again speaking of the "poor creature whom you last week dismissed;" as if Z. could be said to be dismissed from a mind which his image for ever haunts like an avenging shadow, and from

which it wrings out delirious and passionate outcries at the very moment when you are lauding your coolness and magnanimity.

me.

And now, before parting with you for a month, allow me to return you my best thanks, for the very kind and condescending permission which, in a late Number of the Examiner, you gave me to come forward and avow myself. This was more than kind— it was generous. I need fear nothing from you-so you inform me. But it would seem as if there were some other formidable Champion into whose hands you would wish slyly to deliver Of him, as of you, my contempt is perfect. As you got him to praise you and your verses in the Edinburgh Review, so may you get him at small cost to defend you in a Sunday Newspaper. But let him have a cooling draught before he enters the lists. I observed him lately breaking all the laws of chivalry, by using foul language to some humble squire who had spied a pimple on his nose. Give him a visor and send him forth to the battle. Choose for his shield-bearer the flower of the Cockney youth. Have warm possets and salves ready against his return from the combat, and one or two of your own 66 Nepheliads" to bring some "bubbling freshness" to his green wounds. Let this man of steel come at his leisure. You at least are disposed of. True that you called out 66 a foul blow," but it has been decided against you by impartial umpires, and it is evident that you have not weighed your metal before you rushed into the battle. Your imprudence has been great; had it not been the offspring of so much conceit I should have disdained to punish it. The die is cast. It is now too late to talk of retreating.

And now, for the present, I know not that I have much more to add. That you have been irritated to a state of lunacy by my Critiques on the Cockney School of Poetry, of which you are the founder, is proved by your raving and incoherent denials. You, who have libelled so many men, ought not to have considered yourself sacred from the hand of vengeance. Above all persons living, you, the Editor of the Examiner, who have so often run a muck, stabbing men, women, and children, should, if unable to defend yourself when the avenger came, have

had the sense and fortitude at least to endure punishment with decent composure. But your whole mind seems to be one universal sore of vanity, and the pinch of a finger and thumb causes you to shriek out, as if you were broken on the wheel, and to burst into insane invectives with the very avowal of silence on your pale quivering lips. Silent you cannot remain; and when you speak out against me, what is it you say? Nothing. Your abilities, which on some subjects are considerable, then utterly desert you; and instead of rousing yourself from your lair, like some noble beast when attacked by the hunter, you roll yourself round like a sick hedge-hog, that has crawled out into the " crisp" gravel walk round your box at Hampstead, and oppose only the feeble prickles of your hunch'd-up back to the kicks of one who wishes less to hurt you, than to drive you into your den.

The question at issue between Leigh Hunt and Z. is not to be decided by raving on your side, or contempt on mine. It is to be decided by that portion of the public who have read your works, and, if need be, the charges I have brought against them. You alone, of all the writers in verse of the present day, of any pretensions, real or imaginary, to the character of poet, have been the secret and invidious foe of virtue. No woman who has not either lost her chastity, or is desirous of losing it, ever read "The Story of Rimini" without the flushings of shame and self-reproach. A brother would tear it indignantly from a sister's hand, and the husband who saw his wife's eyes resting on it with any other expression than of contempt or disgust, would have reason to look with perplexing agony on the countenances of his children.

You may, henceforth, endeavour to remain silent, and it may be well for you that you do so. But I shall hereafter have much to say to you. Your vulgar vanity, your audacious arrogance, your conceited coxcombry, your ignorant pedantry,-all the manifold sins and iniquities of Cockneyism lie spread before me as in a map; and I will not part with your Majesty till I have shewn your crown, which you imagine is formed of diamonds and pearls, to be wholly composed of paste and parchment, and

glass-beads; your robes to be worthless as old rags from St Giles'; your sceptre to be a hollow-hearted and sapless broom-stick, which no hawker could vend without dishonesty; and your throne itself, though glittering with gew-gaws, to be no better than a broken-armed kitchen-chair, and worthy to be the seat of that "Washerwoman," whose charms you, in the “ Round Table,” have, like a fitting knight, so chivalrously celebrated.

I shall probe you to the core. I shall prove you to be ignorant of all you pretend to understand. I shall shew that you have written verse for these ten years without ever having had one glimpse of what true poetry is; that you have been a weekly babbler about patriotism and freedom, and yet, all the while, the most abject slave that ever bowed himself to clear the path before the idol-chariot of anarchy. I shall shew the world to what a low pass the spirit of England is reduced, when any of her children can stoop to be instructed by one who has not a single iota of the English character within him; one who is in his religion as base and cold as a second-hand sceptic of the Palais Royal; who, in his politics, mingles the vulgar insolence of a Paine with the weakness of a mountebank and theatrical notable; whose perceptions of moral truth have been embalmed in strains that might be cheered from a Venetian Gondola, but which have had no effect in England, except that of heaping an already contemptible name with the blackest infamy of voluntary pandarism and coveted humiliation.

The advantage which I have over you, Mr Hunt, is indeed a very considerable one. You should have reflected better before you thus compelled and invited me to make my most of its power. I have the established sentiments of national honour on my side. There is not a man or a woman around us, who venerates the memory of a respectable ancestry, or the interests of a yet unpolluted progeny, that will not rejoice to see your poison neutralized by the wholesome chemistry of Z. There is not a single mother of a seduced daughter, or a single father of a profligate son, or a single repentant victim of sophistical vice, that does not lavish the foulest of execrations on your devoted head. Even VOL. III.

in those scenes of wickedness, where alone, unhappy man, your verses find willing readers, there occur many moments of languor and remorse, wherein the daughters of degradation themselves, toss from their hands, with angry loathing, the obscene and traitorous pages of your Rimini. In those who have sinned from weakness or levity, the spark of original conscience is not always totally extinguished. To your breast alone, and to those of others like you, the deliberate, and pensive, and sentimental apostles of profligacy, there comes no visiting of purity, no drop of repentance. Your souls are so hardened, that the harlot deity, who is worshipped by others with their senses alone, claims and receives from you the prostration and slavery of intellect. Alas! that where pity is so much the predominant feeling, I should be forced, by the stubbornness of the offender, to array myself in the externals of severity. Confess only that you have done wrong,—make a clear breast of it,-beg pardon of your God and of your country for the iniquities of your polluted muse, and the last to add one pang to the secret throbbings of a contrite spirit, shall be Z.

In Reikie sounds the town-guard's drum no

more,

Nor cadie plies, nor "wha wants me" is near, Her Luckenbooths now choak the common shore,

And " Gardeloo" but seldom meets the ear. Those days are gone-but wenches still are here:

Lands fall, flats empty-nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Reikie once was dear,
With her cheap clarets' bright festivity,
Revel of tappet-hen, high-jinks, and mut-
ton-pie!

But unto us she hath a spell beyond
Her lands of fourteen stories, long array
Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms des-
pond

Above the Provostless city's waning sway:
Ours is a trophy which will not decay,
With all the Bailies-Brodie, Thomas
Muir,-

Leith-pier will ne'er be worn or swept away, The key-stones of the arch! Though, to be

Girdles it in-a space that may be smelt!
So we go on, I fear to little good-
Meanwhile the rivals one another pelt!
Oh, for one hour of him who knew no feud,
Th' octogenarian chief, the kind old Sandy
Wood!

Notes to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
CANTO V.

Chiefly Written by MR H.
STANZA 1.

"I stood, Edina, on thy bridge of sighs, For who that passes but has sighed or bann'd," &c.

The reason given in the text for affixing the appellation of " bridge of sighs" to the bridge commonly called the North Bridge, which joins the old and new town of Edinburgh, may be the true one; for the hideous building alluded to, which, like Satan's Pandemonium, lately" rose like an exhalation" out of the North Loch, has been more sighed over and execrated by the good people of Edinburgh, than any thing which has happened in our day, if we except the publication of that unparalleled piece of blasphemy and scurrility called the Chaldee MSS. A more accurate investigation, leading to a very curious historical illustration, will, however, point out a more probable explanation of this term. It is perhaps not generally known to the inhabitants of this renowned city, that there are certain dungeons called "pozzi," or whatever other delicate name you may choose to give them, sunk in the thick walls of the bridge, which, from the groans that issue from them, may well get the name of the Bridge of Sighs. You descend to them by a narrow trap-stair, and crawl down through a passage half-choked by rubbish, to the depth of two stories below the level of the street. If you are in want of consolation for the general extinction of Cloacinian patronage in Edinburgh, perhaps you may find it there, though scarcely a ray of light glimmers into the narrow gallery which leads to the cells; and the places of confinement A small hole themselves are totally dark. in the lower wall admits the damp air from the loch below, and serves for the deposition of the prisoners' food. A wooden cross bar, raised about two feet from the ground, is the only furniture. There are many cells in the same line; but there are some beneath the others, and respiration is somewhat difficult in the lower holes. Only one prisoner was found when the Magistrates descended to inspect these hideous recesses, and he is said to have been confined sixteen minutes. But the inmates of the dungeons had left traces of their repentance, or of their despair, which are still visible, and may perhaps owe something to recent in

genuity. Some of them appear to have offended against, and others to have belonged to, the sacred body, from the indecencies and blasphemies, or from the churches and belfries, which they have scratched upon the walls. The reader may not object to see a specimen of the records prompted by so terrific a solitude. As nearly as they could be copied by more than one pencil, four of them are as follows:-

1

"Trust no other,
Not even your brother

Can give thee assistance.-
Here goes! keep your distance!
James Craigie."

2

"Speak no word; Hold in your breath; Press hard

For life or death.

John Buchan of the College Kirk."

3

Friends and foes may say as they please,
So help me God! I shall here have my ease.

4

Pauperibus æque prodest, locupletibus aque, Eque neglectum pueris senibusque nocebit.

Th. Lamb. Stud. Log. 1817.

For a more scientific and statistical view of this subject, see the leading article of Constable's Scotch Magazine for March.

STANZA 2.

"She looks like old Cybele on Mount Ida, Rising with her tiara of proud towers."

An old writer, describing the appearance of the old town of Edinburgh, has made use of the above image, which could not be poetical were it not true,-as Boileau's "creaking lyre, that whetstone of the teeth, monotony in wire," has it" Rein n'est beau que le vrai."

STANZA 2.

"Mother of lawyers, writers, clerks, and wh-es."

This line alludes to a very curious old rhyme which the author of Childe Harold and another English gentleman, the writer of this notice, heard when they were rowed to Pettycur with two singers, one of whom was a chairman, and the other a fisherman. The former placed himself at the bow, the latter at the stern of the boat. A little after leaving the pier of Leith they began to sing, and continued their exercise until we arrived off Inchkeith. They gave us, among other essays, "The Death of Sir Patrick Spence," and Wat ye wha's in yon town," and did not sing English but Scotch verses. The chairman, however, who was the cleverer of the two, and was frequently obliged to prompt his companion, told us that he could translate the original. He added, that he could sing almost three hundred stanzas, but had not spirits (fairntosh was the word he used) to learn any more, or to sing what he already knew. A man must have idle time

on his hands to acquire or to repeat ;" and, said the poor fellow," look at my breeks and at me; I am starving." This speech was more affecting than his performance, which habit alone can make attractive. The recitative was shrill, screaming, and monotonous, and the fisherman behind assisted his voice by plugging his finger into one side of his mouth, and making his cheek sound "buck" as he drew it out. The chairman used a quiet action, something like the regular jolt of a chair; but he became too much interested in his subject altogether to repress his vehemence. The verses to which my noble friend so elegantly alludes are the following: "Glasgow for bells, Linlithgow for wells,

Edinburgh for writers and wh-es." Many, amongst the lower classes, these men informed us, are familiar with this interesting and most comprehensive stanza, which, for rapid sketching, is equal to any thing in our language.

STANZA 4.

"Provostless city."

Vates, I remember being taught at Harrow (I owe all to the benevolent birch of Dr Joseph Drury), signifies a prophet as well as a poet. It is in the former character that I speak here. Edinburgh has still her Provost and her Bailies, but how long?" All the law proceedings on this interesting question, as well as every scrap that has been spoken or written on the subject of the new buildings on the Bridge of Sighs, shall appear in the historical illustrations.

"Brodie."

Thanks to the acumen of the Scotch, we know as little of Brodie as ever. The hypothesis which carried many along in its current, viz. that he is still alive, is run out; and we have thus another proof that we can never be sure that the paradox, the most singular, and therefore having the most agreeable and authentic air, will not give way to the established ancient prejudice.

It seems however certain, in the first place, that although Brodie was born, lived, and was hanged, we have no proof that he was buried. The Grey-friars and the Westkirk may indeed resume their pretensions, and even the exploded Calton-hill may again be heard with complacency. That deliberate duties were performed round a carcase deposited in one of these three places of interment, twelve hours after the execution, we have incontestible proofs,-but who knows whether it was not the body of one who died of the plague, or of the typhus fever? Did any one see the mark of the rope round the neck? There was indeed a false key and a forged note thrown into the grave along with it; but that may have been done out of mere malice. It does not appear that even Bailie Johnston could bring ocular proof (though he were to produce the skeleton) that this was the identi cal Brodie,