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being at that very instant busy in regulating the internal affairs of the island of Barrataria, of which the worthy Don had promised him the government when he had conquered it himself. Don Quixote, on the other hand, was not a castle-builder of the higher class. He called in the strength of his arm to aid his delusions, believing to be matter of fact those airy nothings which the true castle-builder regards as recreative illusions, and which cease to be harmless, if he attempt to realize them. The Knight of Cervantes took shadows for substances, and this leads me to denominate the style of castle-building which I contend is so agreeable, refreshing, and innoxious-the Poetic, in contradistinction to what may be called the Prose order. The last species is a delusion respecting something, the attainment of which is possible, though it is extremely difficult and improbable. In furtherance of the actual realization of our schemes, we lay under contribution every moral and physical aid. Pyrrhus King of Epirus was an adept in this kind of castle-building, as his conversation with Cineas proves. When we have taken Italy, what do you design next? said Cineas; Pyrrhus answered, to go and conquer Sicily. And what next?—then Libya and Carthage. And what next?-why then to try and reconquer Macedon, when, his legitimateship said, they might sit down, eat, drink, and be merry, for the rest of their days. Cineas drily advised the king to do that which was alone certainly in his power-the last thing first. In like manner, a German author has recently constructed a castle: he has undertaken a work, which for bulk and labour will leave Lopez de Vega and Voltaire sadly in the lurch. It is to include the history, legislation, manners and customs, literature, state of arts, and language of every nation in the world from the beginning of time; and this, which he proposes to complete himself, will occupy him laboriously for half-a-century, and carry his own age several years beyond the hundred. The French are clever at this style of castle-building: they plan admirably well, commence their labours with enthusiasm, but leave off in the middle of them. Canals, harbours, triumphal arches, constitutions, and Utopian plans of polity, abundantly attest this. Who but a Frenchman would have written to Franklin, offering, with a preliminary apology for his condescension, to be King of America, and actually expect pecuniary remuneration for humbling himself to such a purpose! poor Falstaff was one of this latter class of castle-builders, though it must be confessed he had something of a foundation upon which to erect his edifice, when he heard the Prince of Wales was king and exclaimed, "Away, Bardolph, saddle my horse-Master Robert Shallow, choose what office thou wilt in the land, 'tis thinePistol, I will double charge thee with dignities." So are lovers who cherish extravagant hopes and imagine their mistresses to be something between a very woman and an angel-like fish, neither flesh nor fowl. The supporters of a balance of power in Europe, for which England has entailed on herself and upon her posterity such an enor mous debt, is like Falstaff's interest with the new king, and, together with the payment of the said debt, a piece of castle-building worthy of King Pyrrhus.

But poetical castle-building alone is a pleasant and harmless amusement of the fancy, which we must lay by when we pursue our everyday avocations, without suffering it to interfere with the realities of

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existence. It is the mixing these up with its air-built pleasures that produces mischievous effects. An example of this may be found in the worthy country divine, who, having preached a score or two of orthodox sermons, thought therefore, in the simplicity of his heart, that he had some claim for patronage upon all good statute Christians, whom he determined to edify by publishing his labours for their benefit. He little guessed, greenhorn that he was, the real hold of religion upon his supposed patrons, and the true state of the market in respect to such commodities. His guilelessness of soul made him suppose that where there was a church-establishment, there must necessarily be among its numerous members a high value for religious discourses such as his were an error he fell into for want of knowledge of the world. He calculated every thing, not forgetting the expenses or the profits of his undertaking; and that he might keep within the bounds of modesty, and show nothing like self-presumption in respect to the worth of his lucubrations, he determined to limit the impression of his volume to one copy for every parish. He printed, therefore, fearlessly, eleven thousand copies. The sequel may be gathered by enquiring about the affair in the Row.

"The wisest schemes of mice and men
Gang aft awry,"

says Burns. In these matters, therefore, castle-building must give place to dry evidence and the matter-of-fact testimony of the senses. Those who act otherwise in these affairs waste their years in running round a circle, and find themselves in the end at the point from which they set out. Among these materializers of the airy nothings of the mind, are the perpetual-motion-hunters, who astound society with their discoveries, and are at last obliged to creep off, as the sporting people say, "like dogs with their tails between their legs." The credulous experimenters after the discovery of the philosopher's stone; of an universal remedy, the elixir of life, by which man is to defy sickness and defer death for a thousand years; the gambler's martingale for subduing chance; and the navigators to the moon-afford examples enough of the folly of endeavouring to realize the fantasies of imagination, and of trying to build with sunbeams and prismatic colours the coarse and ponderous edifices of man's erections.

These objections, however, do not affect castle-building of the right kind: the enjoyer of which truly believes his visions too subtle for the common world, from which he must withdraw himself to see them. He sets out with the perfect consciousness that the feast of which he is going to partake, belongs not to tangible existence, that it consists of ethereal aliment laid out in the universe of spirit, and that consequently it is an intellectual entertainment upon "ambrosial food," which, while he tastes, must receive from him no alloy of corporeal substances. He knows that this pleasure is an illusion, like all others, even those that consist of better things; but he, nevertheless, derives a temporary satisfaction from it. Pleasant to him is the short interval of rest in his armed-chair after dinner, for, when the foolish world thinks him taking his nod, he is in an elysium-pleasant are his silent devotions to Raleigh's soothing weed, to the solace of his segar or hookah-pleasant is the still hour of night when sleep is deferred a

little only to be the sounder when it comes, and the unslumbering fancy revels in unweared luxury, and rears the noblest edifices in her matterless region-pleasant, in short, is castle-building whenever the mind wants renovation, or amusement of its own peculiar character, and can so employ itself without a waste of time or attention from more important objects. Y. I

THE LAST LOOK OF GRANADA.

O the evening sun goes sweetly down
On the old Alhambra walls

At the close of day, when the sunbeams stray
Through the lone and silent halls:

When the shifting gleams of the parting beams

Come softly trembling in,

Through the branching boughs that the myrtle throws,
On the marble floor within.

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'Twas a fearful hour that saw the power
Of the Moslem rent away-

Sad shapes were driven o'er the darken'd heaven
Through the long and weary day.—

The breeze's breath was still as death,

Yet sounds came wandering by,

Like the moan that woods and waters make
When winds are in the sky.

The crescent there shone high in air

When the sun of morning broke-
At the evening hour, from Comares tower
Fernando's trumpet spoke :

Our king comes in, with the music's din
And the victor's proud array;

And one must part, with a heavy heart,
From the city of his sway.

He look'd not round-he spake no sound

He stoop'd not from his pride,

Till his step he stay'd, where the pines o'ershade

The lonely Daro side;

Then he turn'd him back, on his exiled track

He turn'd him once again,

And his eyes they took their last fond look

Of the Paradise of Spain.

They wander'd down, where tower and town
In the yellow moonbeam lay;

Nevada's height look'd out in light

And the white-wall'd Santa Fe;

It slept upon the Vega field

It sparkled on the rill;

The stars of night lay calm and bright

In the silver-waved Genil.

But the Christian hymn, from the city dim,

Came loud upon his ear

He heard the shout of the rabble rout

And he could not bear to hear.

He turn'd aside, for he felt the tide

Of tears begin to flow;

But the drops came fast, and he wept at last

In the bitterness of woe.

"Farewell! ye towers, and streams and bowers,

A last farewell," he said :

Outspake his queenly mother then

As she raised her stately head:

"'Tis well thy part-the coward heart
Should end as it began,

And he may weep, that could not keep
His kingdom like a man."

G. M.

LAST YEAR.

"See the minutes how they run:
How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,

How many years a mortal man may live."-SHAKSPEARE.

EIGHTEEN hundred and twenty-three years have elapsed since the Infant of Bethlehem changed the history of the Universe. If we cast our eyes backward along the stream of time, from the present moment to that eventful æra, what a strange succession of human revolutions crowds upon our vision! The Roman Empire-My dear Sir, exclaims the reader, Gibbon's Decline and Fall occupies of itself twelve goodly volumes, and if you purpose leading us through all the intermediate time, even in the briefest summary, we may come to the end of our days before you will have completed your centuries. Your exordium is too solemn and grandiloquent: what is antiquity to us, or we to it? Time in the wholesale is rather too bulky a commodity for either a writer or reader of periodicals; but if you have any little retail article referring to that portion of it with which we have both been conversant, and which therefore comes home to our business and bosoms-any epitaph, for instance, upon the year which has just expired, we will promise you, provided it be not too much in the lapidary style, (as Dr. Johnson terms it,) to honour it with a resolute attempt at perusal. Contributors to magazines are like actors-" they who live to please must please to live," and therefore, most conditional reader, (for I dare not assume thy retention of that title, if I do not tickle the sides of thine understanding,) I promise to limit our excursion to the three hundred and sixty-five days which our common hobby-horse the Earth has employed in performing his last gallop around the sun.

A foreigner of distinction once asked a British member of Parliament what had passed in the last session ;-"Five months and fourteen days" was the reply; and if many of us were asked what we had accomplished in the last year, we might be reduced to the necessity of stating, that we had not only become twelve months older; but that, exclusive of our little terrestrial excursions from London to our country houses and back, we had been travelling round the sun at the rate of fifty-eight thousand miles every hour, and, in the rotatory motion of the earth upon its own axis, had completed an additional five hundred and eighty miles in every similar space of time. So far we have established our claim to be considered as a part of the sublime scheme of creation; but as to any thing that we have performed worthy of an intelligent being, moving in such a magnificent pageant, and obviously framed for the most noble destinies, it is to be feared that very few have reason to be proud of their exploits. Hundreds of thousands are at this moment making up the accounts of the last year, with a reference to their profit and loss, but how many dream of a mental debtor and creditor statement to ascertain the gains or deteriorations which they have experienced in the affections of the heart, or the faculties of the head? or how many calculate their chances in that eternity to which

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