must be expected, and that "Spondaic lines are almost the rule;" unfortunately most of these "Spondaic lines" are rather Trochaic lines, e. g. the second in the volume. "Long had the stone been put, tree cast, and thrown the hammer." And by way of compensation for occasionally falling short a few syllables, they now and then run over a good many, till they almost equal the notorious Alexandrine of the Scotch versifier:

"And was not Pharaoh a saucy rascal,

Who would not let the Children of Israel, their wives and their little ones, their flocks and their herds, and everything they had, go out into the wilderness for seven days to eat the Paschal?"

The plot of "The Bothie" is the merest thread. Six Oxford men go out on a Reading party. Reading, in the University slang, means studying, and the reading parties are so called, on the lucus a non lucendo principle, because the party do anything but read. The veritable students stay at the University, while the "parties" betake them. to quiet little places (such as the Island of Jersey, for instance), where the wine is cheap and the women handsome, and the climate pleasantly enervating, and "the contingent advantages generally remarkable," as Dick Swiveller says it may be judged how much reading they accomplish. Our party go to the Highlands, bathe chiefly, and one of them falls in love, and is ultimately married to a mountain lassie: his amatory proceedings are made the medium of introducing more Carlyle and Tennyson run mad than we have seen for many a day. However, not wishing to prejudice the reader, we shall give him a few extracts to judge for himself; and they shall be given in accordance with the more fashionable than just rule of picking out the best bits we can find:

THE USE OF DIFFERENT DENOMINATIONS OF CLERGYMEN.

"Here too were Catholic Priest and Established Minister standing,
One to say grace before, the other after the dinner;
Catholic Priest; for many still cling to the Ancient Worship,
And Sir Hector's father himself had built them a chapel;
So stood Priest and Minister, near to each other, but silent,
One to say grace before, the other after the dinner."

A touching picture of concord this: it reminds us of a venerable and lamented friend, who used to give little soirées to all the ists and ories in the city, from Hughes to Bellows inclusive and the interference of the Police was not found necessary on a single occasion:

WHAT THE "READING PARTY" DID WITH THEIR BOOKS.

"Lo the weather is golden, the weather-glass, say they, rising;
Four weeks here have we read; four weeks will we read hereafter;
Three weeks hence will return and revisit our dismal classics,
Three weeks hence readjust our visions of classes and classics.
Fare ye well, meantime, forgotten, unnamed, undreamt of,
History, Science, and Poets: lo, deep in dustiest cupboard
Thookydid, Oloros' son, Halimoosian, here lieth_buried. *
Slumber in Liddell-and-Scott, O musical chaff ** of Old Athens,
Dishes and fishes, bird, beast, and Sesquipedalian blackguard!
Sleep, weary Ghosts, be at peace, and abide in your lexicon-limbo,
Sleep, as in lava for ages your Herculanean kindred,
Eschylus, Sophocles, Homer, Herodotus, Pindar, and Plato."

QUANDARY OF AN "EARNEST MAN," AFTER THE MANNER OF CARLYLE.

"I am sorry to say, your Providence puzzles me sadly;
Children of circumstance are we to be? You answer, oh, no wise!
Where does Circumstance end, and Providence where begins it?
In the revolving sphere which is upper, which is under?
What are we to resist, and what are we to be friends with?
If there is battle, 'tis battle by night: I stand in the darkness,
Here in the melée of men Ionian and Dorian on both sides,
Signal and pass-word known; which is friend and which is foeman?
Is it a friend? I doubt, though he speak with the voice of a brother.
Still you are right, I suppose; you always are and will be.
Though I mistrust the Field-Marshal, I bow to the duty of order.
Let us all get on as we can, and do what we're meant for,
Or, as is said in your favorite weary old Ethics, our ergon.
Yet is my feeling rather to ask, where is the battle?

Neither battle I see nor arraying, nor King in Israel,
Only infinite jumble and mess and dislocation,

*

Backed by a solemn appeal for God's sake do not stir there.""

* A literal translation of the pseudo-epitaph of Thucydides. ** Chaff is fast-man for banter.

METAPHYSIC MUSINGS AND LOVE-LONGINGS OF A POETIC YOUNG

RADICAL.

"Souls of the dead, one fancies, can enter, and be with the living, Would I were dead, I keep saying, that so I could go and uphold her! Spirits escaped from the body can enter and be with the living, Entering unseen, and reliving unquestioned, they bring do they feel, too?

Joy, pure joy, as they mingle and mix inner essence with essence!
Would I were dead, I keep saying, that so I could go and uphold her!
Joy, pure joy, bringing with them, and when they retire leaving after
No cruel shame, no prostration, despondency, memories rather,
Sweet, happy hopes bequeathing, Ah! wherefore not thus with the
living?

Would I were dead, I keep saying, that so I could go and uphold her ;
Is it impossible, say you, these passionate fervent impulsions,
These projections of spirit to spirit, these inward embraces,
Should in strange ways, in her dreams should visit her, strengthen
her, shield her?

Is it possible rather that these great floods of feeling

Setting in daily from me towards her, should impotent wholly Bring neither sound nor motion, to that sweet shore they heave to? Efflux here, and there no stir nor pulse of influx!

It must reverberate surely, reverberate idly, it may be.

Yea, hath He set us bounds which we shall not pass, and cannot? Would I were dead, I keep saying, that so I could go and uphold her; Sureley, surely, when sleepless I lie in the mountain lamenting, Surely, surely, she hears in her dreams a voice 'I am with thee!' Saying 'although not with thee; behold, for we mated our spirits Then, when we stood in the chamber, and knew not the words we were saying,'

Yea, if she felt me within her, when not with one finger I touched her, Surely she knows it, and feels it, while, sorrowing here in the moorland,

Would I were dead, I keep saying, that so I might go and uphold her!" And hereabouts we fell into a doze, and dreamed that a friend asked us what we had been reading, and we told him the Bother of toping no Physick, and he said he thought the title a very strange one and not at all true, for it was the Bother of toping Physick that had disgusted him with the old school and made him a Some-thing-or-other-path, and then we woke up in the act of writing a dreary essay on English Hexameters, which would infallibly have put our public to sleep, but we shall be merciful, and only inflict on them this stray scrap of it.

English lines that will do duty for Hexameters are the easiest things possible to write easier than any kind of rhyme. Real English Hexameters are harder to write than real Blank Verse, and à fortiori harder than any kind of ryhme. Even these are chiefly valuable as tours de force. Sir Philip Sidney wrote Hexameters in his day, so did Southey in his, so do Hare, Whewell, Longfellow, Clough, cum multis aliis, at the present time; but the metre is never likely to be popular. We say this not on account of any particular unfitness in the Hexameter for the purposes of modern versification, so much as on the general principle that exotic metres cannot be successfully introduced into a language already supplied with measures of verse. A strong instance of this is afforded by the German Trochaic Stanza of Five-Trochee lines, with Cataletic lines alternating. No one ever read "The Gods of Greece" or "The Bride of Corinth" in the original without being struck with the beauty and grandeur of this metre, yet we will wager that no one prefers Bulwer's translation of the latter poem to Anstey's. Nor has Aytoun's original poem in the same stanza (Hermotinus), though published in Blackwood with a particular description of an eulogy on the measure prefixed, found many admirers or imitators in ten years, and the author has not been tempted to repeat the experiment.

NEW YORK SOCIETY AND THE
WRITERS THEREON.
Literary World, 1850.

1. Earning a Living. A Comedy in Five Acts. By a Citizen

of New York. New York. 1849.

2. Revue du Nouveau Monde.

Publiée les 1er et 15 de

chaque mois. Par Regis de Trobriand.

3. The Lorgnette; or, Studies of the Town. By an Opera Goer (weekly). Henry Kernot, New York.

SOME fifteen months ago the American Review threw out a hint of the ample field afforded to the satirist in

New York fashionable society, and expressed some surprise that the subject seemed to be left by tacit consent of competent parties, in the hands of Mr. Willis. The field is now, it seems, to be worked in earnest, for the first time (with the above-mentioned exception) since the days of Salmagundi; and we are very glad of it. The observations of educated and refined men upon society and manners are not only amusing in a merely literary point of view, they are of great value to the future historian, and of present importance in representing the country correctly to the eyes of foreigners. One reason why English editors so often take their ideas of American city life from the New York Sewer, and other equally absurd sources, is because American gentlemen have written so little on this topic. The sketches of Mr. Willis, racy and amusing as they usually are, do not supply our desideratum.

After all, much remains to be said on the subject. Thus far our writers have aimed rather at exposing follies than at throwing out any hint of remedies for them. This is a necessary first step, but only the first step. It is very possible that in endeavoring to amend or supply the deductions or want of deductions of these writers, we shall only mar their lucid statement of the premises; still the spirit moves us so strongly to say something, that we must even take our chance. And what we have to say, be it premised out of respect to our friends at a distance, will have reference particularly and solely (unless where otherwise distinctly specified) to New York society, not merely because our Gotham is in some senses, and most certainly in a fashionable sense, the metropolis of the Union, but because to discriminate the differences and shades of fashionable life in our several cities, would require more personal observation than we have devoted to the subject, and more space than these columns allow us.

--

What then, to begin, are the prominent features of New York fashionable society those for instance that would first strike an entire stranger who, armed with the proper letters and habiliments, should tumble in upon the middle of a season? The most remarkable is one which would seem at first sight rather adapted to the observation of the medical than the fashionable traveller,