judgments in the Court of Chancery, and picking the pockets of clients and eating the oyster. In the matter of oysters themselves, Colchester also preserves its well earned reputation. Marriage was heretofore an affair of estates and money; and this is a fashion too which has grown with our growth. Cupid stands firmer than ever in the position which he has so long occupied. Hence, e contra, Love is out of fashion, as it is unfashionable for a wife to be of use, to know the nature, extent, operation, or expenditure of her family-her family-her husband's family; to attend to her children or to herself, to any part of herself but her dress. Unfashionable indeed!-it is absolute disgrace; irreparable dishonour.

It was once the fashion to make pickles, and preserves, and work chair-bottoms. Mr Burgess now makes the pickles, and Mr Oakley the chairs. The fashion now is to beat on a pianoforte and squall. High and low, gentle and simple, the tailor's daughter and the grocer's daughter, squall and thump on the pianoforte from eight to eight-andtwenty, or till they are married; and the farmer's daughter leaves the cows to Hodge to milk, and the butter and cheese to Cicely.

It is the fashion too to read Lord Byron and to despise Pope, to talk of Shakspeare and the Quarterly Review, to be learned and ological and clever, and, born of rum and tallow, to quit Farringdon Without for Portman Square. Thus also it is the fashion, or was, to admire Washington Irving, and Harlequin Irving the sable denouncer of God's vengeance against backsliders; as it is to whistle the Freyschutz about the streets, and to wonder how much money Duke Smithson spent at the Paris

.coronation.

In the days of yore, not long yore, it was the fashion at least to affect a virtue if they had it not; but, better taught, we now throw open the drawing-room to repentant, or not repentant, sinners; and virtue, very properly, has become the name which the

poet called it long ago. The hierar chy itself, desirous no doubt to prove its charity, scorn not to sit down with these publicans and sinners. Fashion would be worthless if it were not worth something.

Wherefore do we send our children to Eton?-because it is the fashionable school; to Westminster, because it is the fashion; to Harrow, because it is the fashion; and not to Hazlewood, because it is not the fashion. It is the fashion to be alter nately slave and tyrant; and therefore my lord must fag for the tailor, or the tailor for my lord-it is all one. It is the fashion to ruin the morals, and therefore it is proper to spend money at Eton and Harrow. It is the fashion to go to Oxford, and therefore to Oxford we go; it is the fashion to suppose we learn Greek, and therefore we suppose it.

But these are of the permanent fashions; like the Court of Chancery: as in some other cases, we adhere to the bad and renounce the good. It is a misfortune that smok ing and drinking punch are out of date; for since fashions must change, it would be better to change Greek than punch, and Oxford than smoking.

We would even consent to take back again hair-powder, or the duty on malt, in exchange. But, perhaps, the fashion of fourteen years' flogging upwards from the lowest form to the highest, will yet change; and then it will be the fashion to learn to swarm a pole, to jump a ditch, and walk upon a rope.

There are hopes of any reformation when comedy has given place to elephants and monkeys, and a bowery and flowery walk at Kensington Gardens to a dusty dirty parade among horses and carriages, when the typography of Fust is revived in the shape of stereotype, and a man dare not drink porter after his cheese.

If there is a fashion in poetry and bonnets, so there is too in physic. And why not in physic as well as in eating. It is now the fashion of Sangrado; and why not?—since it

all proceeds on the facile principle of imitation; the monkey principle. It is much easier, here too, to follow than to guide: it saves thinking. There is but one receipt, and any man can follow it-bleeding and hot water, hot water and bleeding"seignare, purgare, iterum purgare et seignare." Calomel and salts Cheltenham. We are all too full, and must be depleted; blood is a poisonous substance; it must be let out.

And then there is the last new remedy:-Croton one year, barytes another, muriatic baths, prussic acid -champooing or rhatany-root; just as Lord Harborough's beard succeeds to Lord Petersham's whiskers. It is the fashion too for the plague and the typhus not to be contagious, and it is the fashion to have the ticdouloureux, and bile-and to culti vate conversation and society by crowding three hundred people into the room that might hold twenty. As it was, or is the fashion to pay for the cards that are played with, and as it was the fashion to pay for your dinners, and as it is going to be the fashion to play at ecarte, that the hostess may cheat her guests out of money enough to pay for the lights and the cakes.

And because all society is reduced to the simple element of an annual crowd, it is the fashion to have folding doors, and to spoil the only two rooms of a miserable house, spoiling our own comfort all the year round that we may accommodate-"where by they may be thought to be accommodated"-our friends, once in the year, with the opportunity of breaking their carriages and wishing the assembly and the assembler at Old Nick.

And it is the fashion to build churches; and most abominable are those churches. Because why?— because other fashions have crept into religion. Such as-discovering that the Pope is desirous of excommunicating kings, and that Prince Hohenlohe cures toothach and epilepsy point blank five hundred miles" that morality is a crime,

"yea, a crime my brethren" that we must prostrate our reason and believe in Calvin or Huntington; that Dr Hawker is either Moses or Elias; and that it is impossible for any person to be saved unless he follows Irving or Chalmers, or else Dr Collyer, or else somebody else; and that if he follows the wrong luminary he is a lost sinner, it being at the same time made and provided that nobody can agree which is the right one.

And so there is a fashion in preaching, and grace, and salvation, and eternal life; but the worst of it is, that with less prudence than the fair who all wear the same bonnet when it is in vogue, there are so many different coiffures that no one can get his head into the real, right, orthodox cap.

As to blacking, it is undetermined whether the fashion of the veritable cirage Anglaise, il vero lucido Inglese, lies with Warren, or Hunt, or Day and Martin: but it is certainly the fashion now to think that commerce ought to be free, that Mr Malthus is in the right, that Mr Macculloch is a greater economist than Mr Ricardo, that the bullion question is unintelligible, that the state of the country is a paradox, that the Niger is either the Nile or is not the Nile, that chimney sweeping is a very dirty trade, and Mr Thomas Wallace, aided by Mr John Hall, a very clever man.

Further, the fashion of joint-stock companies is becoming daily subject to increasing dubiety, and even the Duke of Wellington has become rather unfashionable, as, apparently, the same is about to happen to Mr Wilberforce, and Mr Macaulay, and Tom Campbell, and even to the Great Unknown. And also to the Edinburgh Review, and the Quarterly Review, under the laziness of the one editor, and the incapacity of the other, and to the Modern Athens in spite of Sir George Mackenzie, and Dr Brewster, and Sir James Hall, and Mr Lockhart, and Blackwood himself'

the moral, the elegant, the instructive, the modest Blackwood, and his

caterer Professor Wilson, who, in professing Moral Philosophy, has ingeniously contrived to separate the morals from the philosophy.

Will war ever go out of fashion; and scandal and backbiting?-Yes, with eating and drinking; or at the Millenium. Or puffing ?-At the same epocha.

We want a fashion-setter here; that is certain. In the mean time

it is in vain that Miss is the most beautiful the most graceful, the most captivating, of her sex: she has not been puffed at Almack's; she is not the fashion. It is in vain that the "Fancy" levels the peer and the highwayman; it is the fashion. It is in vain that "liberty and property for ever huzza!" are but words; they are the fashion. It is in vain that the object of law is to refuse justice; it is the fashion to say otherwise. It is in vain that Mr Martin makes laws against bullbaiting; it is the fashion. It is in vain that wealth is not virtue: it is the fashion; that an Englishman and an English miss cannot walk; it is the fashion that Walter Scott, baronet, is writing balderdash for money; he is the fashion that we tell

:

France she will be overturned by the Jesuits; they are the fashion: that the opera is detestable, and the ballet worse: they are the fashion: that nonsense verses are useless, and Westminster an abuse; they are the fashion: that moustaches are dirty things, and routs a nuisance, and the pianoforte a pest, and Mr Hayter a bad painter, they are the fashion, the fashion, the fashion.

This is the magic word which answers all inquiries, silences all objections, erects all idols-erects and deposes them. And this is that sublime invention, by which Europe is distinguished from the East. China has but one fashion: it has no fashion therefore, it is the eternal, as it is the Celestial Empire. Permanence, even in dress, is permanence: it acts on the empire as it does on the quality of a shoetie: the fashion of revolution, which revolves caps and bonnets revolves empires also. When the East has fallen, it has been by changing its dress. Rome fell when she became fashionable and changing. Had she kept the toga, the red harlot would never have sat in the chair of the Cæsars. It is enough we have done.

NEVER shall I forget their bridal

-earth scarce contained aught more lovely than Maria, as she passed the portal of the village church, and hastened to escape the admiring gaze of the rustic crowd. Maria was barely eighteen, the light of beauty danced in her deep blue eye; but

on this, her bridal morn, its long silken lash hid more than half its brightness, and the snowy veil which fell over her auburn tresses, was not paler than her cheek. I had loved her ere I left my father's roof, but I had no patrimony except a proud name and a soldier's fortunes; and

Maria was a prize too great for one so portioned. I looked upon her bridegroom-every feature was replete with manly beauty, and each well-knit limb might have formed a study for the fastidious statuary; and yet I gazed upon him till my heart swelled almost to bursting, and I turned once more to look upon Maria, and I wished that they had chosen her another lord. Never shall I forget that dark, deep, earthturned eye, or the haughty lip with its triumphant and fearful smile! I left my native village; I sighed not one farewell to Maria. After her marriage we feared to meet; she felt that I loved her, and her own heart, more stubborn than her nature, resisted even yet the harsh mandate of an unyielding parent: she knew it, and she shrank not from her duty. Again I left my home, and the sun of Spain darkened my brow, and her wars nerved my spirit to greater daring; but I retired from her haughty daughters with a sickening soul, for I thought of Maria and of her fatal destiny, and I clung to her remembrance as if my hopeless truth could now in aught avail her. Years sped on, and my heart yearned to revisit the home of my childhood-the birthplace of my first hopes; I trod its path with a firm step, but the sunray which glanced on me in the home of my fathers, rested on the scarred features of a war-scathed soldier; I shrank from the reflection" Should Maria now look on me, how would she deem me changed!" It was a foolish thought, and in the next moment I blushed for its conception. My stay was brief, yet, ere I again became a wanderer, I once more beheld Maria: she had been the mother of two blooming boys, but they had withered, like roses devoured by the foul worm which feasts on beauty. I saw her lord, too; the voice of murmur was on his tongue, and his eye scowled reproachfully as he threw it on his young bride-the pale cheek grew yet paler beneath the glance-the

soft blue eye swelled with the drop of silent suffering-the heaving bosom struggled to repress the sigh which threatened to escape it-and I fled ere my tongue gave utterance to the curse my heart engendered. I became loudest in the revel, but I could not drown the memory of that low stifled sigh; I mingled in the train of beauty, but the deep eye with its large tear was ever in the throng, and every pale cheek on which I gazed in my wanderings recalled the memory of Maria! Again the tented field was my abode, the green sward my resting-place-again my night-slumber was amidst the brave, and my day-dream of conquest and of glory; many a bold and buoyant heart slept in death ere the field was fought-many an ardent spirit bounded no more to the battle; but the death-bullet passed me by, and the wound closed, and the scar healed, when a weapon blade struck me in its descent-and I lived on. My brother soldiers dashed the red stream from the gleaming steel, and shouted victory! till the very skies seemed to echo back the pealing of their voices, and I stood by in silence, and only asked to perish.

We left the fair land of fame and conquest, and I bade adieu to my fellow soldiers for ever: they pressed around me with generous warmth, and besought my stay; but I was a moody and a wretched man, and their words were those of courtesy and compassion! There is a spell in the thought of home! "I will return home and die," I murmured : it was a vain idea, for my father was in his grave, my sister wedded in a foreign land-I was alone: but, Maria dwelt near the spot where I had once been happy, and her proximity was a resting-place for the wounded spirit. But even that link in the

cankered chain of existence was unriveted: Maria had drooped beneath the withering breath of unkindness; she slept in the cold ground. I hurried to the church-yard; two marble tombs gleamed pale in the moonlight

caterer Professor Wilson, who, in professing Moral Philosophy, has ingeniously contrived to separate the morals from the philosophy.

Will war ever go out of fashion; and scandal and backbiting?-Yes, with eating and drinking; or at the Millenium. Or puffing?-At the same epocha.

We want a fashion-setter here; that is certain. In the mean time It is in vain that Miss is the most beautiful the most graceful, the most captivating, of her sex: she has not been puffed at Almack's; she is not the fashion. It is in vain that the "Fancy" levels the peer and the highwayman; it is the fashion. It is in vain that "liberty and property for ever huzza!" are but words; they are the fashion. It is in vain that the object of law is to refuse justice; it is the fashion to say otherwise. It is in vain that Mr Martin makes laws against bullbaiting; it is the fashion. It is in vain that wealth is not virtue: it is the fashion; that an Englishman and an English miss cannot walk; it is the fashion that Walter Scott, baronet, is writing balderdash for money; he is the fashion: that we tell

France she will be overturned b the Jesuits; they are the fashio that the opera is detestable, and t ballet worse they are the fashi that nonsense verses are useless, Westminster an abuse; they are fashion: that moustaches are things, and routs a nuisance, and pianoforte a pest, and Mr Hay bad painter, they are the fas the fashion, the fashion.

This is the magic word whit swers all inquiries, silences a jections, erects all idols-erec deposes them. And this is th lime invention, by which Eu distinguished from the East. has but one fashion: it has 1 ion: therefore, it is the etern is the Celestial Empire. nence, even in dress, is perm it acts on the empire as it the quality of a shoetie: the of revolution, which revol and bonnets revolves emp When the East has fallen, it by changing its dress. when she became fashion changing. Had she kept the red harlot would never in the chair of the Cæs enough—we have done.

R

NEVER scarce [EVER shall I forget their bridal -earth scarce contained aught more lovely than Maria, as she passal of the village church, 1 to escape the admiring astic crowd. Maria was een, the light of beauty er deep blue eye; but

on this, her bridal mo silken lash hid more t brightness, and the snow fell over her auburn tre paler than her cheek. her ere I left my fathe had no patrimony ex name and a soldier's fc