I must confess that here the conversation became too polemic for my attention; and in the long breach in my recollection of this dialogue, I must suppose, that I here fell from a state of dreaming into a deeper sleep, till aroused by the starting of another theme, of which perhaps the reader may hear. For the present I draw the curtain.

TRANSLATION OF GUIDICCIONI'S SONNET TO ITALY.

FROM the base slumbers of a darker age,
My Italy, once more awake and rise!
Behold thy bitter wounds with honest rage,
And blame thyself unhappy and unwise!
Thy vanish'd liberty demands thy sighs,
Lost by thine own unworthy deeds alone.
Retrace those steps which have thyself o'erthrown,
And tread the paths which may regain the prize;
Recall the memory of thine ancient fame,

And think that those who once thy triumphs graced,
On thy own neck the servile yoke have placed.
Thou aider of thy foes, behold thy shame :
Theirs is thy glory, and for thee remains,
Oh, blind and fallen! to endure their chains.

S.

THE LAST OF THE FOOLS.

"This fellow 's wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit;
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time;

And like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labour as a wise man's art;

For Folly, that he wisely shows, is fit,

And wise men, folly-fallen, taint their wit."-Twelfth Night.

THE reader is requested not to be under any apprehensions; nothing personal is intended either to himself or his friends; there is no fear that stultiloquence shall be hushed, or of the race of fools becoming extinct-Heaven forefend! for in that case our occupation would be gone indeed, and we periodicalists, who live to shoot folly as it flies, might cease to extract quills from one goose in order to point them against another. The last man of the genus can never be ascertained until the conclusion of the world; it is of the last of a species that we are about to speak, of one who still lives, and will close in his person a race and a profession long since thought to have been extinct; of one who, in the pride of his former office and of his octogenarian survival of all his competitors, has ordered this inscription to be engraved upon his tombstone-"Here lies THE LAST OF THE COURT FOOLS."

A court is altogether such a factitious and unnatural piece of business, its monotony is productive of such an awful and overwhelming ennui, that men have been obliged to devise various expedients as a recreation whereby they might strengthen themselves to undergo a new infliction of the old stiff, solemn, ceremonious, stately stupidity. These relaxations have assumed different modifications according to the characteristics of age and country. Having a plebeian penchant for republics, the ancient Greeks had no necessity for courtly amusements, and contented themselves with exalting the glory of their country by advancing the arts and sciences, and imitating the unaccomplished homeliness of Themistocles, who, though he could not play upon the fiddle, knew how to convert a small town into a great state. When Pericles, was disposed to unbend, he invited Socrates, Plato, and other philosophers, to such a symposium as Xenophon has described; and passed his hours of dalliance with Aspasia, the most learned woman of her age, from whom he took lessons in oratory and literature as well as love. The Roman Emperors diversified their satiety of enjoyment in a more courtly manner, by a succession of pleasant and piquant pastimes, from the laceration of flies to the butchering of gladiators. In the days of chivalry it was a sport of the great to case themselves in armour, hammer at one another's heads with battle-axes to try which was the thickest, roll the rider and his horse in the dust, or endeavour to drive their lance through the bars of the visor into the bull's eye of their friend's sconce, as Sir James Montgomery served the French king; not that they were ever in earnest, but that these exploits were reckoned hugely comical, furiously frolicsome, and so irresistibly entertaining, that, whatever happened, the parties were bound to look upon the whole proceeding as raillery and badinage. Over these practical jokes presided the ladies, (bless their tender hearts!) "whose bright

eyes rain influence and judge the prize" for every infliction, from a broken leg, a sliced cheek, or a luxated shoulder, to an adversary slain outright. It may be questioned whether our modern belles know half so much of carving, with all the assistance of the plates in Mrs. Rundle's Cookery-book.

Seated in a circle with their legs crossed, smoking their hookahs or drinking coffee, the caliphs and grandees of Arabia relieve the tedium of greatness by listening to professional story-tellers: a practice to which we owe the Thousand and One Nights, and the delightful tales of the inexhaustible Princess Scheherazade. The Grand Signior and his Mufti recreate themselves by chewing opium and gazing upon the stimulating symmetry of dancing girls, until they have at the same time. intoxicated both the senses and the imagination. Upon every stateday, levee, and drawing-room in some of the old Scandinavian courts, there was no amusement so much in vogue, and reckoned such established bon ton, as drinking wine out of the skulls of their enemies. Many of the sable sovereigns of Africa employ the same material in architecture, which, if the averments of travellers may be credited, forms capital pyramids, pillars, and obelisks, in front of which the whole court sometimes indulge in the royal game of leap-frog, not even excepting his woolly majesty himself. According to the authentic statements of Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, a somewhat similar practice obtained at the court of Lilliput, where the courtiers who were to be rewarded by any peculiar mark of favour were accustomed to leap over or crawl under a stick, of which the Emperor sometimes held one end and the minister the other; and whoever performed the best was rewarded with a thread of blue, red, or green silk, which the successful candidates wore about their middle. A process so unmanly and a reward so contemptible will hardly gain credence among so rational a people as ourselves; but at the same time the relations of respectable travellers ought not to be discountenanced upon slight grounds. His Majesty of China, the lord of the celestial empire, monarch of the earth, brother to the sun, and uncle to the moon, (which destroys the mythological relationship between Apollo and Diana,) cousin-german to the stars, and protector of the firmament, can find no better sport than sitting under an umbrella of yellow silk, surrounded with banners of the dragon, phoenix, tyger, and flying tortoise, to be fanned by a handsome boy while he is sipping sherbet and playing cup and ball. The Great Mogul, according to Voltaire, indulges his courtiers by condescending to talk; and his faithful omras, whenever he utters any thing that possesses common sense, testify their loyalty by exclaiming Karamot! karamot !-A miracle! a miracle!

These are the pastimes of uncivilized courts or barbarous æras; but we are indebted to royal lassitude for more rational amusements. Cards were invented about the year 1390, to divert the melancholy of Charles VI. of France, the four classes of whose subjects were intended to be represented by the four suits. By the cœurs (hearts) were signified the gens de chœur, choir-men, or ecclesiastics; the pike heads or ends of lances, which we ignorantly term spades, typified the nobles or military part of the nation; the carreaux, (square stones or tiles,) by us designated diamonds, figured the citizens and tradesmen; the trefoil, (our clubs,) alludes to the husbandmen and peasants; and the court

cards have all their appropriate significations. Upon what trivial chances do the happiness of whole classes and the employment of entire years sometimes depend! If a king of France had not been attacked with blue devils four hundred years ago, how would all the intermediate dowagers, and old maids, and nabobs, and hypochondriacs, and whist-players, have contrived to shuffle and cut away time? What must have become of Bath, and of the long winter evenings, from the days of ombre and piquet down to the present reign of short whist and écarté? The city must have been swallowed up in a mouth-quake of yawns, and the inhabitants have all perished of ennui. Chess is another recreation, or rather a study, which also owes its origin to courts, having been devised for one of the brothers to the sun and uncles to the moon of China, who could not be brought to understand any thing of political economy until these hieroglyphics were placed before him, and all the various estates of his empire, together with their attributes and privileges, were shadowed forth in the figures and powers of these wooden representatives. We have not availed ourselves of an expedient devised for one of the young French princes, who being too indolent or stupid to acquire his alphabet by the ordinary process, twenty-four servants were placed in attendance upon him, with each a huge letter painted upon his stomach; and, as he knew not their names, he was obliged to call them by their letter whenever he had occasion for their services, which in due time gave him the requisite degree of literature for the exercise of the royal functions. In private families this experiment might be somewhat too costly, but it is well worth the serious attention of Lancaster and Bell.

Unquestionably the most sprightly of all inventions which we owe to the dulness of courts is that of the professional jester or fool, than which nothing could have been more expressly and admirably adapted to its end. If not witty himself, he was at least the cause of wit in others the butt at which the shafts of their ridicule were shot, and through whom they sometimes launched them at their neighbours. The jokes might be poor, quibbling, bald, bad; but the contest was at all events mental; not so sparkling, perhaps, as the fight between Congreve's intellectual gladiators, but still preferable to what it displaced, for a play upon words is more comical than a play upon the ribs; it is better to elicit bad puns from one another's sculls than to be drinking wine out of them; it is quite as facetious to smoke a quiz as a segar; a quibble in the head is as comical as a bump upon it; and cutting jokes, however common-place, is assuredly as sprightly as cutting cards, and as humorous as cutting capers. Besides, the court fool frequently availed himself of his offices for nobler purposes. He was a moralist in a motley coat, a fabulist in a cap and bells, a Pilpay or an Esop, who, promulgating the boldest truths to the most arbitrary sovereign, by making his own mouth the medium of wisdom instead of that of animals, might avail himself of his reputed irrationality for conveying the most rational admonitions. Look at Shakspeare's fools; they are either wits in disguise or philosophers in masquerade: and we may be assured, that for the court pantomime, as well as for that at the theatre, the cleverest was generally chosen as clown; for it was necessary that he should be nimble in mind as well as person, that, like Mercury, he should have wings to his head as well as his heels. It must VOL. VII. No. 39.-1824.

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