they are three hundred and sixty-five days nearer than they were at the outset of last year?

Methinks I hear the jingling of sovereigns in the breeches pocket of some warm, portly, and purse-proud reader of Clapham Common or Stamford Hill, as with a complacent chuckle he mutters to himself— "I laid by four thousand six hundred pounds last year"—which he deems a full and triumphant answer to all such impertinent interrogatories. Among a nation of gold-worshippers like the English, bowers of the knee to Mammon, adorers of the glittering deity which Jeroboam set up in Dan and Bethel, I can understand the origin, though I do not recognize the validity of this plea. Nay, it is not difficult to comprehend the gratifications of the professed miser. Nothing is so ridiculous as to pronounce such a man, because his enjoyments differ from our own, to be miserable, in that acceptation of the word which implies unhappiness. His mode of life being his own free election, is a proof of its being the best adapted to his own peculiar notions of pleasure, for no man voluntarily prefers wretchedness. Avarice has been designated the vice of old age; may it not sometimes be its consolation also? When the senses have failed, when the affections are dried up, when there is no longer any intellectual interest in the world and its affairs, is it not natural, that like drowning men, we should grapple at straws; that we should clutch whatever will still furnish us an excitement, and attach us to that busy scene from which we should otherwise sink down into the benumbing torpor of ennui, superannuation, and fatuity? A miser has always an interest in existence: he proposes to himself a certain object, and day by day has the consolation of reflecting that he has made new progress towards its attainment. An old man was lately living in the city, and perhaps still vegitates, who declared that he wished for protracted years, because it had always been the paramount ambition of his soul to warrant this inscription upon his tomb-stone-" Here lies John White, who died worth four hundred thousand consols." Ignoble, sordid, base as this ambition was, it cheered him on in the loneliness and decrepitude of his eightieth year, and is, perhaps, still ministering a stimulant to the activity of his narrow mind. Nor is it a trifling advantage to such men, who being generally worth nothing but money, would, if left to their intrinsic claims, be abandoned to solitude and contempt, that their reputation for wealth procures them friends, flatterers, associates, who watch over them with more than the tenderness of consanguinity, condole with their sufferings, sympathise with them in their successes, submit to their caprices, humour their foibles, and pamper them with presents. Call them, if you will, parasites, plunderers, legacy-hunters: still their good offices are not the less acceptable. If the object of their manœuvres see through their motives, it is a grateful homage to his wealth, an admission of his superiority, a sacrifice to the deity whom he himself adores. If he do not, he affords one more proof, that the great happiness of life consists in being pleasantly deceived. Alas! there are many besides the miser, who would wring their own hearts, if the window of Momus enabled them to discover that of their friends.

But while the money-spinner is endeavouring to sweeten the dregs of life, he is unconsciously embittering death. Unable to take his coin

with him, not even the obolus for Charon, he is only hoarding up a property of which he is to be robbed; for whether he is to be taken from his wealth, or his wealth from him, the result is equally tormenting. Post-obits and reversions, however he may have gained by them after the death of others, will bring him in nothing after his own; so that he will have the mortification of reflecting, that he has been accumulating money, and eking out his life, only to aggravate the pangs of parting from both. Submitting this "trim reckoning" to the consideration of the aforesaid citizen of Clapham Common or Stamford Hill, I would suggest that his four thousand six hundred pounds may not be so all-sufficing an evidence of the beneficial employment of last year, as the jingling of the sovereigns in his pocket may have led him to conclude.

And your Ladyship ?-may I enter upon record that you are well satisfied with the employment of the eight or nine thousand hours of the last year ?—“I have at least passed them, sir, in a manner perfectly becoming my rank and station. I have been at every fashionable party of any notoriety; my own routs have been brilliantly attended; my pearls have been all new set by Rundell and Bridge; my Operabox has been exchanged for one in a better situation; it is universally admitted that I dress more tastefully, as well as expensively, than Lady Georgiana Goggle; I have become so far perfect in Ecarté, that though I play more, I lose less, and adverting to this unquestionable proof of improvement, it cannot be said that I have altogether lost my time.”— Certainly not, madam, you have only thrown it away. I acquit you of its occasional and accidental, in order to convict you of its constant and premeditated misapplication.

Be not alarmed, young lady: it is unnecessary to subject you to the same interrogatory, for those downcast eyes and that half-suppressed sigh sufficiently reveal that you are but ill-satisfied with the appropriation of your time during the past year. It is the misfortune, and not the fault of our youthful females, that the artificial and perverted modes of society, as it is constituted in England, condemn them to a perpetual struggle with all the aspirations of nature;-that they are sentenced to a round of heartless dissipation, to be paraded and trotted up and down the matrimonial Smithfield, in the hope of striking the fancy of some booby or brutal lord and master; and that a failure in this great object of their existence, pitiable as it is, embitters, the termination of every year with corroding anticipations of waning beauty, and all that silent fretting of the spirit, which gnaws the heart inwardly while it suppresses every external manifestation. Few objects are more distressing than to contemplate one of these garlanded victims, gradually withering like a rose upon its stalk, shedding the leaves of her beauty one by one, and at last falling to the earth in premature decay, or preserving a drooping existence with all her charms and brightness fading utterly away. These are the blooming virgins yearly sacrificed to the Minotaur of Luxury, which, prohibiting all marriages in a certain class of life, that are not sanctioned by wealth, debases one sex by driving it to licentiousness, and dooms the other to become a pining prey to unrequited affections and disappointed hopes.

Never have I been more painfully awakened than when in the dead

silence of midnight, I have been startled by a peal of "triple-bob-majors," which, in peforming their foolish ceremony of ringing out the old year, send forth their inappropriate echoes into the universal darkness, and scare the repose of nature with their obstreperous mirth. It is an unhallowed and irreverent mode of solemnising the twelvemonth's death. It is as if at the funeral of a deceased parent a rejoicing chime should suddenly burst like a peal of laughter from the belfry, instead of the sad-slow-deep toll of the single passing bell. These iron tongues. should not be allowed to shout out their indecent merriment at a consummation fraught with so many inscrutable mysteries and appalling associations. What! are we cannibals so to rejoice that a portion of our best friends has been actually eaten up by the omnivorous maw of time? Are we saints and of the elect so fully prepared for the blow of death that we can carol at being brought three hundred and sixty-five days nearer to the edge of his scythe ?-Perhaps it may be urged, that these noisy vibrations are rather meant to salute the present than the past year, to celebrate a birth, not a death, to welcome the coming rather than to speed the parting guest: and that upon the accession of a new year, as of a new king, their brazen and courtier-like loyalty finds more delight in the glory which is rising, and full of promise, than in that which has just set and can bestow no more. The ancients divided their annual homage with a less obsequious selfishness. Janus, who stood between the two years, gave his name indeed to the first month, but he was provided with a double face, that by gazing as steadfastly upon past as future time he might inculcate upon his worshippers the wisdom of being retrospective as well as provident. But Janus was an ancient and a god; had he been a modern and a man, he would have known better !

However it may have been partially misapplied and wasted, the last year may still, perhaps, have materially advanced the sum of human happiness, and as it is impossible to solve this point by an examination of individual evidence, we will decide it by a show of hands. All you who are as much or more discontented with your present lot, than you were twelve months ago, please to hold up your hand.-Heavens! what an atmosphere of palms, gentle and simple, fair and furrowed, cosmeticised and unwashed; what a forest of digits, some sparkling with diamonds, some unadorned, and a whole multitude cinctured with the wedding-ring!-You, on the contrary, who feel yourselves happier than you were hold up your hands. Alack! what a pitiful minority! A few youths who left school at the last Christmas holidays, and an equal number of girls who, having dismissed their governesses, are to come out this season. Young and sanguine dupes, enjoy your happiness while ye may: I am not serpent enough to whisper a syllable in your ear that might accelerate the loss of your too fleeting paradise!

H.

PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE OF COWPER.*

PERHAPS no poet of modern times excites a more perfect sympathy in the reader than Cowper-there is no one with whom we cherish, and desire to cherish, so purely personal a feeling. But this feeling, though created and called forth by means of his writings, does not point at them, or even seem to have any necessary connexion with or dependence upon them. It is not with his writings that we sympathise; so far from it, there are many portions of these which we peruse with pain, and turn away from not without indignation. And the parts which we do admire, and which unquestionably include a large proportion of the whole, do not lay hold of our affections, or fix themselves upon our memory, as those of many other poets do. We do not dwell and harp upon them, and repeat them to ourselves, and quote them to others, and dream of them, and recur to them in the midst of other things, without being able to avoid it. He has no passages that haunt us like a strain of music, and will not be got rid of. We are able to lay his poetry down, and take it up again, just as we please -to put it on and off, like a garment. But it is not so with our abstract notion of the man. In him, and in all that seems to concern him, we feel a personal interest: and after a time we read his writings, not so much for their own sake, as for his, and because we desire to know all his feelings, and the causes and consequences of them; we read them as a means, not as an end—as a means of reading him.

This was strikingly the case even before the publication of Hayley's Life of the poet. But when that took place, the feelings of personal regard which had before been called forth by Cowper's poetry, became increased to a pitch of almost painful interest by means of the letters which his biographer, with a kind of unconscious judgment and good taste, substituted in the place of any other detail of the writer's life: for "Hayley's Life of Cowper" is luckily to be found no where but in the title-page of his volumes-the poet being permitted to tell his own story, so far as it suited the views of his friend to let that story appear. The letters to which we now refer, were, almost immediately on their appearance, allowed to take their station beside the most distinguished productions of any time or country, in the class to which they belong. And they in fact deserve that station; a very great proportion of them being models of the epistolary style, in point of ease, grace, and unaffected simplicity; and being, moreover, the pure effusions of as gentle and tender a heart as ever beat within a human bosom. But Cowper's letters, as they appeared in the publication alluded to, were calculated to engender other feelings than those of admiration towards themselves, and affectionate regard towards the writer of them. Previously to this time, certain parts of his poetry, which need not now be particularly referred to, had raised suspicions that something was at work in the writer's mind which ought not to have been there. There was occasionally a tone of feeling, and a turn of

* Private Correspondence of William Cowper, Esq. with several of his most intimate Friends. Now first published from the Originals in the possession of his kinsman John Johnson, LL.D. rector of Yaxham with Welborne, in Norfolk, 2 vols. Svo,