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perdrix," and who complain with Sir John Brute that man and wife are one flesh, it must be a great consolation to know that, without the risk either of Doctors' Commons or of standing in a white sheet, they may have a new wife nearly once a month; and that, although the minister with his cabalistical forms may (in the language of the British Critic) transmute "two human beings into one matrimonial animal,” yet it is quite beyond his power to bind a man for any duration to the same So far, indeed, from the wicked knight's having cause to dread the kissing himself in his lady, he cannot at the end of forty days be sure of himself in his own proper person. To those, on the contrary, who have an high esteem for themselves, and look down upon the rest of mankind as on an inferior caste, it must be the very devil and all to learn, that in forty days they must part with the bright object of their incessant adoration; and not only that some of their own " divine particles" may pass into a cauliflower or a cabbage-or, what is worse still, into the bodies of those they so heartily despise but that they themselves may, in all probability, be polluted and contaminated by receiving in exchange some of the cast-off elements of others, and so fraternize in a worse than Mezentian embrace with the objects of their high disdain.

To the prisoner and bondsman it must be a delightful revelation to be told that his habeas corpus is so near at hand; that no hard-hearted creditor, no obdurate gaoler, can retain a single particle about him in custody for more than forty days; and that while they attack the form and shadow only of the outward man, the substance, ere two revolutions of the moon, must fade from their grasp, to wander in all the frolic of unlimited freedom through every element of nature. Should the knowledge of this truth be widely disseminated through society, it can scarcely be doubted that it will form an available plea of error persona. Who, indeed, will be able in surety of conscience to swear to "the prisoner at the bar," if forty days shall have elapsed between the commission of the crime and the day of trial? O vanity of human justice! the thief who stole the jewels escapes, and a wretch, neither in mind nor body the same individual, swings in his stead: while the fine gentleman that figures at court with stars, garters, and medals, has nothing in common with "the Great Captain" who won the battle and conquered the peace!

To the advocates for Negro Slavery this physical fact is invaluable, as an unassailable rock upon which they may build an irrefragable argument in favour of their right to the persons of their victims. Allowing all that nature, Christianity, and common sense have advanced in favour of the slave's original right to his own body, must it not be at once conceded, that, after forty days' bondage, that right will completely evaporate; the body having become so much animalized meat and drink, the undisputed goods and chattels of the master, worked up merely into a more valuable form, and as much at the service of the proprietor as a steam-engine constructed at his own proper charges and with his own iron and timber?

This continued flux of our corporeal being, this metensomatosis (as Plato would have called it, had Plato known any thing of the matter,) which is perpetually going on with such incessant activity, is accompanied by a similar change in our passions, feelings, reflections, voli

tions, and all the other habits of our intellectual being: and I pray you, reader, if you be an inquisitor, or a taker of the altitude of other men's consciences in any shape whatever, to observe, that I do not say that these facts stand to each other in any degree in the relation of cause and effect. I have no wish to bring down on my head a disputer, armed with a volume of polemics to attack me, because he may fancy my orthodoxy an inch or two below the standard measure. Leaving, therefore, this ticklish question to be settled by the anatomists and the divines-who are equally competent to decide, the one knowing as much about the matter as the other, I content myself with noting the fact, that the two sets of phenomena run together pari passu, like two well-trained horses in a curricle; and that, as fast as we are flinging overboard our old selves, and taking in fresh cargoes of fleshly personality, we are likewise discharging an infinity of whims, caprices, tastes and distastes, opinions, prejudices, facts, and fables, and stowing away others in their place to the full as absurd, mischievous, or useless as the earliest freights of our youth and inexperience.

Many of us, I am sure, there are who wonder what in the name of Heaven is gone with the Greek and Latin which cost our fathers so much money, and ourselves (I mean our former selves) so many stripes in our quondam behinds. Can it be that some ill-advised absorbent has asported it in a lump of medullary matter, or an artery overlaid it with a quantity of unflogged and unharassed cerebral substance? This, however, as I have already said, I leave to others deeper in transcendentals than myself, the Kants and the Cants of the land. For me it is truth enough to know that gone it is, strophes and systems, Asclepiads and Glyconies, prosody and grammar, and all; leaving scarcely enough behind to puzzle the country gentlemen readers of the Magazine from time to time with an odd quotation, abstracted from my common-place book. Yes! gone it is, into that valley

Ove mirabilmente era ridutto

Ciò che si perde, o per nostro difetto
O per colpa di tempo o di fortuna.

Ariosto, Canto 34, Stanza 73.

And with it are gone "Love's young dream," the abstract pleasure of existence, the sweets of novel-reading, the charm of reverie, the delights of the Nouvelle Heloise, the bright image of Susan Truefaith, (and divers other images; to wit, three thousand four hundred and fifty-four, as a special pleader would lay the count;) and, worse than all, an hearty appetite and a sound sleep. In the place of these valuable commodities, what have I acquired? Much caution and more ennui, much respect for money and more discontent, an increasing sympathy with the caustic severity of Byron and Voltaire, and more toleration for the dry arguments of less profane writers, a growing partiality for the pleasures of the table, and a closer intimacy with doctors and apothecaries. Alas! alas! what changes are here! The "purple light of love" replaced by a pair of spectacles, and the fire of youth by fleecy hosiery and the glow of a gouty foot; the heart-aches of passion superseded by the heart-burns of indigestion, and the thrills of desire by the twinges of the liver! When I try to forget for a moment these growing ills, by mixing in society, and take my part in the old glee of "Oh no,

no, no, wine cannot cure the pains I endure," an inevitable association makes me think much less of "my Chloe" than of the last frost.

These curious facts and inferences had been rolling in my head for some days, when, falling into a doze for five minutes after dinner in my easy chair, I dreamt a dream. Methought I was still sitting in my easy chair awake, and pondering the theme which in reality had led me from reverie to rest, when, suddenly, a thin scarcely visible vapour emanated from my person, and gradually concentrating itself over the vacant seat which my wife had just left that I might enjoy my nap undisturbed, took the form of myself as exactly as if reflected from a looking-glass.

66

You must be convinced, said my spectred self, that your notions on personal identity are perfectly true; and though to your own conception man is an unit, a whole, a person, to the intellect of an atom, (for atoms think and feel intuitively and without organs,) he is a compound of the most incongruous diversity. In this sense, and in this alone, man is a microcosm, a thing "of shreds and patches," an assemblage "undique collatis membris,' non bene junctarum discordia semina rerum," picked up from every region of sublunary nature. His humours depend on his digestion, his thoughts and his propensities change with his diet; a glass of brandy makes him a madman, a dose of physic reduces him to a sage. Cuvier has said, that he is an attracting and repelling focus. To me he is a mere machine, fabricating virtues of vegetables; converting beer and wine into oaths and curses; working beef, as Lord Byron conjectured justly, into ferocity; and converting luxurious diet" as sure as rain engendereth hail" into wanton wishes. You yourself are no more the same gay, light-hearted, presumptuous coxcomb you were at twenty-three

In sul tuo primo giovenile errore

Quand' eri in parte altr' huom da quel che tu sei,

(I beg Petrarch's pardon for the liberty taken with his quotation)-than you are Napoleon Bonaparte, John Wesley, or the Bishop of Peterborough. Nay, you are no more the same man you were before dinner, when you were so cross and cantankerous, than you are the sickly urchin, muling and puling in the nurse's arms, of forty years ago. Having arrived at this part of his discourse, the figure commenced a long tirade of obscure and unintelligible metaphysics, which he learned, Ï know very well where. He talked at great length on essences and entities, on the vital principle, and Malthus on Population: but I observed, that in proportion as the ideas became more confused, the image became more indistinct; its visible form partaking evidently of the confusion of its own notions: when suddenly the door opened; Sancho, according to the established etiquette in these cases, jumped on my knee; and I awoke, with the full determination of writing down all I had heard, and leaving it to the reader to decide, whether this dream passed through the ivory gate, or through its colleague

Cornea, quæ veris facilis datur exitus umbris.

M.

SALVATOR ROSA, AND HIS TIMES.

THE accomplished writer, whose work, under the above title, has just issued from the press, might have spared herself the pains of replying by anticipation to the question, why she should have selected Salvator Rosa as the subject of her first essay in Biographical writing? For if, in place of the above enquiry, it had been asked-"Supposing Lady Morgan to try her versatile hand on biography, who, of all the distinguished dead that have hitherto remained without their due meed of posthumous attention, is she likely to fix upon ?" all who have been able to take an unprejudiced view of her previous writings, and through them of her peculiar turn of thought and sentiment, would probably have replied with one accord," Who but Salvator Rosa?" Who but he -who was, by turns, the boyish serenader of the beauties of Naples; the youthful wanderer among the wild heights of the Abruzzi, and the captive and afterwards the companion of their banditti; the poor, but proud and unbending artist, who would study in no school but that of Nature, and submit to no patronage but that of a whole people; the graceful and accomplished lover, who courted his mistresses in his own poetry set to his own music-each of which was unrivalled in its day; the wild, witty, and enthusiastic Improvvisatore-who dared to utter, into the very ears of the great, truths which others dared scarcely to think; the sensitive and deep-thoughted philosopher, who distanced the age in which he lived, and meditated on what might be till he could scarcely endure what was; the dark and gloomy conspirator of the Torrione del Carmine, and the active champion of Liberty against Oppression as a leader in the Compagna della Morte, under that most extraordinary of all revolutionary chiefs, Masaniello, the fisherman of Amalfi; the bold, bitter, and uncompromising satirist of all the vices and corruptions of his debased but still beloved country;-he who was all these and much more; and who added to and blended with them all (at least during the latter years of his life) the character of incomparably the most original, and upon the whole the most popular and successful artist of the times in which he lived; this too in times when high art was supreme over all secular things, and high artists were permitted to hold a rank next to that which man confers upon himselfwhen the nobility of Nature was considered as second only to that of name!

In fact, it must be admitted that Lady Morgan has chosen her subject most happily, both with reference to its own peculiar susceptibility of amusing and instructive developement, and to the kind of talents and acquirements which she brings to the task. It remains to be seen in what manner she has availed herself of these double advantages. But before entering into this examination, perhaps we can scarcely do the reader a more acceptable service, than by striking off a brief and rapid sketch of the Life which Lady Morgan has undertaken to develope in all its detail, and set forth to the world in all its singular variety of shades and colours. The materials we shall use for this purpose are chiefly those which she has here placed before us; and for the sake at

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once of variety, and to enable the reader to judge for himself as to the mere style in which she has conducted her enquiry, we shall occasionally use extracts from her work; and the rather as it can scarcely as yet be in the hands of any of our readers.

On one of the loveliest of all the lovely sites that overlook the Bay of Naples, in the little village of Renella, was born, in the latter end of the year 1615, Salvatore Rosa-so called, probably, partly because it was the fixed intention of his pious parents to devote their son to the church; and partly because the name of Salvatore, when bestowed at the baptismal font, was considered, in the superstitions of the time and country, as something like a pass-word to eternal happiness. The little Salvatore, however, so far from exhibiting any early symptoms of saintship, soon became the scape-grace of the village; and his saving name was speedily spoiled by the expressive diminutive of ello-Salvatoriello. Still, however, his worthy and respectable," but indigent parents, were inflexible in their determination of having their only son brought up for the priesthood; and accordingly at a very early age he was placed under the discipline of the holy fathers who conducted a college at Naples, called that of the Congregazione Somusca. But even previously to this early period, Salvator had shewn unequivocal signs that his destiny was not to be controled by the will of others, whatever it might be by his own; and he had already evinced, to those who could observe them, tolerably clear indications of the point to which his genius tended. For he was in the constant habit of playing truant from his imposed studies, to wander alone among the wild and sublime scenery in the neighbourhood of his native village; and when imprisoned as a punishment for his imputed fault, he used to cover the walls of the chamber in which he was confined with rude repetitions of the various objects which had attracted his attention in his ramblesdone with pieces of burnt stick which he prepared for the purpose. Nothing moved, however, by these natural indications of the line in which their son's genius destined him to move---but on the contrary, greatly scandalized at the bare possibility of his becoming an artistthey lost no time in hurrying him away to the College in which they had with some difficulty procured him admission. The following imaginary picture, of the father and son departing from their village-home for the college at Naples, may be offered as a very pleasing and characteristic specimen of the manner in which Lady Morgan treats her subject.

"In an age and country so marked in all their forms and modes by the picturesque, this departure for the College must have been a scene to paint rather than to describe. The mind's-eye, glancing back to its graphic details, beholds the ardent boy, with his singular but beautiful countenance, and light and flexile figure, both models in a maturer age, issuing forth from the old portal of the Casaccia to attend his father to Naples. He is habited in the fantastic costume of the Neapolitan youth of that day; a doublet and hose, and short mantillo, with a little velvet-cap, worn perhaps even then with an air galliard, and a due attention to those black tresses so conspicuous in all his portraits for their beauty and luxuriance. Vito Antonio, on the contrary, at once to shew his loyalty and decayed gentility, affects the fashion of the reigning court mode. For then, as now, all that looked Italian was deemed suspicious;

* His father, Vito Antonio Rosa, was an architect and land-surveyor, and occupied the largest house, the Casaccia, of the village.

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