THE COMFORTS OF AN INN, &c. you, sir." Omnés. 1 « Please to petitions and apologies. THE CHANGE OF RINGS. (From the German.) Two lovers bound themselves by mutual faith to separate during the latter part of the seven years' war, or as long as the officer chose to serve, or the campaign lasted: they agreed however to consider themselves as engaged, and accordingly exchanged rings, and swore eternal and inviolable constancy. This affair was signified on the rings, and the initials of the words were engraved on each: On the ring of the lady which she had given her lover, were the following letters: THE COMFORTS OF AN INN. A GENTLEMAN whose veracity may be depended upon, slept, or rather should have slept, at the York Hotel, in the city of York, one morning in the month of May, 1822. Having been engaged with a party of friends, he did not retire till midnight; an hour which in that place is not considered untimely. Having taken his place by the Highflier Sheffield Coach, which left York at half-past eight the next morning, he gave express orders to be called at half past seven. Having no dread of evil spirits, he straightway composed himself; but his rest was of short duration, for at one o'clock, he was roused by a knocking at the door. "Who's there? said the sleepy traveller. "Pray, sir, don't you go by Mail?—No, I go by the Highflier." "Beg your pardon, sir, it's another gentleman." This unwelcome visitor robbed him of his next half hour's repose; but after many twistings and twinings, he slumbered again. Scarcely had Morpheus taken him into his service, ere a second voice saluted his ear. "Two o'clock, sir, the Express will be off in half an hour." "What have I to do with the Express? I wish you would express yourself elsewhere." "Laws, sir, why I was towd as how you went by the Express.” “I told your master I was to go by the Highflier, and I hope I shall hear no more of you till half past seven." "I ax your Alas! I languish truly; now adored friend, pardon, sir." Again he tumbled and tossed, and again he became subject to the son of Erebus; but like poor Monsieur Tonson, he was doomed to be haunted. At half past three, he heard a loud thundering at the door :-" Sir, I've brong your boots, you mun be up in a moment, the coach is at the doer." Out bouuced the astonished guest, and quickly rejoined, "Why did not you speak before? I have had trouble enough with one or the other of you. Why did your master say the coach went at half past eight?" "Bless me, sir, is it you as goes by the Highflier? they towd me as how you went by the Nelson. Beg your pardon, sir, am sure." In any place but York this would have been the last customer, but the fates conspired. At five he hears another knocking, and his patience being exhausted, he exclaims, "What the d- do you want." A faultering female replies, "Don't you go by the Highflier, sir ?” “To be sure I do." "Well, sir, I'll be sure to call you at half past seven.' Half past seven arrived, and the gentleman made his appearance amidst numerous assemblage of menials, all loaden with a A. I. L. T. N. A. F. A. adieu. On the ring which the gentleman gave to her: H. T. F. T. PE. Hold thy faith, thy pains endure. After an absence of eighteen months, the officer returned at the end of the war, in expectation of marrying the lady, but found her wedded to another. He went immediately to her, to reproach her infidelity, but was received with great coldness, and abusive raillery. On his bare mention of the ring, and the verses on it; she desired him with an insulting smile to read the letters backwards on the ring she had given him, and he would find their true meaning. Adieu for ay, no true lover is absent. On hearing this, he was so enraged, that he begged the same favour of her to read his ring likewise in the inverse order of the letters, and she would also discover their true signification. Egregious perfidy! thou'rt false, thou Harlot! INDIAN COTTAGE. MARIA GRAHAM, describing one of these, says, "We found at the principal hut three very pretty children playing round their grandmother, who was sitting on the ground in a little viranda, at the end of the house, grinding rice for the evening meal of the family. Three or four goats with their kids were tied to stakes round the door, and a few fowls were running about in the garden. We sat by the old woman while she made her bread, but at a sufficient distance not to pollute her cooking utensils or her fire. Every vessel she used, though apparently clean before, she washed, and then mixed her rice flour with milk, water, and salt, when she beat it between the palms of her hands till it was round and thin, and baked it on a round iron plate, such as is used in Scotland for oat cakes. Besides these, she prepared a few heads of maize by rubbing off the chaff, and laying them in the fire to roast for the family supper. No. XLIV. THE FOOL. He goeth after her as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks. PROV. vii. 22. "Madness is sweet,' the mad-man cries, And void of care and woe: Nor serious thoughts engage his mind, As well, his actions show. Heedless of fate, the witless fool, Like sportive lambkin, treads, And knows not that his every step To Death's sad portal leads. At the next hut, the woman was grinding missala, or curry stuff, on a flat smooth stone, with another shaped like a rollingpin. Less than an English halfpenny procures enough of turmeric, spice, salt, and ghee, to season the whole of the rice eaten in a day by a labourer, his wife and. six children; the vegetables and acids he requires are found in every hedge. In one corner in each of the huts stood a large stone with red powder sprinkled on it, as a household god, and before it were laid a few grains of rice and cocoa nut, as offerings. SHAKING HANDS. AT a late duel in Kentucky, the parties discharged their pistols without effect; whereupon one of the seconds interfered, and proposed that the combatants should shake hands. To this the other second objected as unnecessary; "for," said he, "their hands have been shaking this half hour." The DANCE of DEATH. 73 No. XLV. THE THIEF. Men to destroy, with fell intent, The thief by night does rise; And now to spoil an aged dame, Of her full basket, tries. 1 suffer wrong,' she cries; and God A CLEVER THIEF. A LEADER of a noted band of thieves, who infested some of the villages and public fairs in the neighbourhood of Glasgow, had a custom of waiting in some garret or private place contiguous to the bustle, and when his light-fingered troops (dispensing with the usual tedious formalities of bargain or barter) had made a transfer of property in their favours, they repaired to the resort of their captain, and deposited their booty. On a Fair day in Kirkintilloch, the troops being rather unsuccessful, the captain wearying, sallied out himself, and observing a customer weaver, with a wallet on his back, containing a web, a small part of the end of which was hang ing out of the wallet, the captain placed himself close up to the back of the weaver, and with a needle and thread,, quietly and firmly sewed the end of the web to the tail of his own coat, then made his way through the crowd pulling the web after him. The weaver feeling that he was relieved of his burden, hastily No. XLVI. THE BLIND MAN. If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into For, while the man does vainly hope turning round, observed the latter end of QUEEN BESS. A COURTIER came running to her, and, with a face full of dismay, Madam,' said he, 'I have bad news for you: the party of tailors mounted on mares, that attacked the Spaniards, are all cut off. Courage, friend said the queen; this news is indeed bad; but when we consider the nature of the quadrupeds, and the descriptions of the soldiers, it is some comfort to think we have lost neither man nor horse.' PERSONAL CHARACTER OF (From the London Magazine.) Lord Byron was irritable (as I have said), irritable in the extreme; and this is another fault of those who have been accustomed to the unmurmuring, obedience of obsequious attendants. If he had lived at home, and held undisputed sway over hired servants, led captains, servile apothecaries, and willing county magistrates, probably he might have passed through life with an unruffled temper, or at least his escapades of temper would never have been heard of! but he spent his time in adventure and travel, amongst friends, rivals and foreigners: and doubtless, he had often reason to find that his early life had unfitted him for dealing with men on an equal footing, or for submitting to untoward accidents with patience. His vanity was excessive---unless it may with greater propriety be called by a softer name--a milder term, and perhaps a juster, would be his love of fame. He was exorbitantly desirous of being the sole object of interest: whether in the circle in which he was living, or in the wider sphere of the world, he could bear no rival; he could not tolerate the person who attracted attention from himself; he instantly became animated with a bitter jealousy, and hated for the time every greater or more celebrated man than himself: he carried his jealousy up even to Buonaparte; and it was the secret of his contempt of Wellington. It was dangerous for his friends to rise in the world if they valued his friendship more than their own fame--he hated them. It cannot be said that he was vain of any talent, accomplishment, or other quality in particular; it was neither more nor less than a morbid and voracious appetite for fame, admiration, public applause: proportionably he dreaded the public censure; and though from irritation and spite, and sometimes through design, he acted in some respects as if he despised the opinion of the world, no man was ever more alive to it. His lameness, a slight mal-formation of the foot, did not in the least impede his activity; it may, perhaps, account in some measure for his passion for riding, sailing, and swimming. He nearly divided his time between these three exercises: he rode from four to eight hours every day when he was not engaged in boating or swimming. And in these exercises, so careful was he of his hands (one of those little vanities which sometimes beset men) that he wore gloves even in swimming. He indulged in another practice which is not considered in England genteel, that is to say, it is not just now a fashion with the upper classes in this country-ke chewed tobacco to some extent. At times, too, he was excessively given to drinking; but this is not so uncommon. In his passage from Genoa to Cephalonia, he spent the principal part of the time in drinking with the Captain of the vessel. He could bear an immense quantity of liquor without intoxication, and was by no means particular either in the nature or in the order of the fluids he imbibed. He was by no means a drinker constantly, or, in other words, a drunkard, and could indeed be as abstemious as any body, but when his passion blew that way, he drank, as he did every thing else, to excess. There was scarcely a passion which he had not tried, even that of avarice. Before he left Italy he alarmed all his friends by becoming penurious-absolutely miserly, after the fashion of the Elwes and other great misers on record. The pleasures of avarice are dwelt on with evident satisfaction in one of the late cantos of "Don Juan"-pleasures which were no fictions of the poet's brain, but which he had enjoyed and was revelling in at that moment; of course THE WAGER LOST, &c. he indulged to excess, grew tired, and turned to something else. Lord Byron was not ill-tempered nor quarrelsome, but still he was very difficult to live with; he was capricious, full of humours, apt to be offended, and wilful. When Mr. Hobhouse and he travelled in Greece together, they were generally a mile asunder, and though some of his friends lived with him off and on a long time (Trelawney for instance), it was not without serious trials of temper, patience, and affection. He could make a great point often about the least and most trifling thing imaginable, and adhere to his purpose with a pertinacity truly remarkable, and almost unaccountable. The Greeks had a kind of veneration for Lord Byron, on account of his having sung the praises of Greece: but the thing which caused his arrival to make so great a sensation there was the report that he was immensely rich, and had brought a ship full of sallars (as they call dollars (to pay off all their arrears. So that as soon as it was understood he had arrived, the Greek fleet was presently set in motion to the port where he was stationed; was very soon in a state of the most pressing distress, and nothing could relieve it but a loan of four thousand pounds from his Lordship, which loan was eventually obtained (though with a small difficulty), and then the Greek fleet sailed away, and left his Lordship's person to be nearly taken by the Turks in crossing to Missolonghi, as another vessel which contained his suite and his stores actually was captured, though afterwards released. It was this money, too, which charmed the Prince Mavrocordato, who did not sail away with his fleet, but stayed behind, thinking more was to be obtained, as more indeed was, and the whole consumed nobody knows how. However, the sums procured from his Lordship were by no means so large as has been supposed; five thousand pounds would probably cover the whole, and that chiefly by way of loan, which has, I hear, been repaid 75 In travelling, he was an odd mixture of indolence and capricious activity; it was scarcely possible to get him away from a place under six months, and very diffcult to keep him longer. It is said that his intention was not to remain in Greece-that he determined to return after his attack of epilepsy. Probably it was only his removal into some better climate that was intended. Certainly a more miserable and unhealthy bog than Missolonghi is not to be found out of the fens of Holland, or the Isle of Ely. He either felt, or affected to feel, a presentiment that he should die in Greece, and when his return was spoken of, considered it as out of the question, predicting that the Turks, the Greeks, or the Malaria, would effectually put an end to any designs he might have of returning. When dying, he did not know his situation till a very short time before he fell into the profound lethargy, from which he never awoke; and after he knew his danger, he could never speak intelligibly, but muttered his indistinct directions in three languages. He seems to have spoken of his wife and his daughter---chiefly of the latter; to this child he was very strongly attached, with indeed an intense parental feeling; his wife I do not believe he ever cared much for, and perhaps he married her for mercenary motives. THE WAGER LOST. "Come, Ned," said Phil, "let's have some tea, The kettle's boiling now I see; Egad I'll make a glorious meal." Hunger and thirst, alike I feel, Said Ned, "I'll wager great or small. The kettle does not boil at all." And see, I put the money down: "Done, done," said Phil," done, for a crown, Behold! the water oozing out, And steam fast issuing from the spout." I take the crown-poor Phil, 'tis mine; "Aye, aye," said Ned, but that's no sign, Now own for once you're wrong a little.The water boils-but not the kettle." HINT TO MINISTERS. QUIZ Our Ministers say, and it causes a smile, Let them choose those who've two wooden legs to each man : The advantage is clear, legs and feet being lost, Their toes they would ne'er find nipt off by the frost. QUIZ. A WINDFALL. A HOUSE having fallen down one day during a heavy gale of wind, a wit most provokingly congratulated the owner on his windfull. |