lishment, Dillon took an early opportunity of proceeding to the next town, where he purchased suitable habiliments for Phoebe Burrows, in which she attired herself greatly to her own satisfaction, and that of the whole family, save the old grandmother, who muttered curses upon the folly of spending money upon a young slut unable to earn her own bread. The transformation was almost magical. The girl's figure now exhibited all its fine but delicate proportions, and the natural freedom and grace of her motions became strikingly conspicuous. Dillon looked at the father, a perfect abortion, and wondered how anything lovely could proceed from such a coarse and rugged piece of deformity. The mother, it is true, was tolerably well-formed, but her gross, heavy frame, and vulgar, unfeminine gait, seemed to repel the thought that any thing so symmetrically beautiful as Phoebe Burrows could have been begotten of her.

Our hero very soon made a confidant, to a certain extent, of the one-eyed gipsy, acquainting him with the avocation he had adopted in London, but carefully concealing from him his late success. There was something in this very congenial to the feelings of Burrows, who, though he had hitherto confined himself to petty thefts, was not a man to refuse joining in any unlawful enterprise, so long as he was likely to be a gainer by the issue. The first adventure of the Hobgoblin, after he had been settled in his new abode, was of a more moderate kind than he had lately been accustomed to engage in; yet here his remarkable good fortune in escaping those perils, which, more or less, accompany all unlawful acts, was remarkably apparent. About three miles from the gipsy's retreat, stood the small neat vicarage of a tolerably large parish. The vicar being a man of limited income, a burglary would be attended with too great a hazard for so inconsiderable a booty as was likely to be obtained from the house of a parish priest, with a numerous family, and an income of only three hundred a-year. But the house was surrounded by a large garden, in which there was a great quantity of winter apples and pears, that had been left upon the trees in order to preserve their flavour, and whence they were plucked as they happened to be wanted. These fruits being very choice of their kind, our hero determined to send them to a distant market for the benefit of himself and his new ally, in spite of the warning of man-traps and spring-guns, duly fixed in one corner of the garden, and threatening death or laceration to any trespasser who

should dare to intrude upon the premises. Notwithstanding this notice of danger, one dark night the Hobgoblin clambered the wall with his usual facility, and dropped into the garden. Having previously marked the position of the trees bearing fruit, he soon disencumbered them of their load, and put the produce of his exertions into three large sacks which he had provided for the occasion. Not satisfied with a considerable booty of fine apples and pears, the latter of which hung upon trees trained against the southern wall, he mounted a medlar tree, and having shaken off a sufficient quantity of the fruit, descended, dropping to the ground from one of the lower branches. It happened that under this branch, which was supported by a thick stake, as the tree was very old and in a state of decay, a steel trap had been placed, in the centre of which Dillon's foot struck when he dropped from the propped limb. The spring being thus relaxed, off went the terrible instrument, and his leg was within half a dozen inches of its steel fangs, when the post that had been placed as a supporter to the branch of the old medlar, released from its ordinary duty by the shock our hero had produced in descending, fell betwixt the teeth of the trap, just as the lucky rogue had put his foot within the formidable

snare.

The gin closed upon the unconscious stake, and Jemmy Dillon, to his infinite surprise and delight, drew out his leg unscathed. He now gathered up as many medlars, in addition to the fruit already secured, as his sacks would contain. Having filled these, he dragged them to the wall, fastened two cords to the mouth of each, and, throwing one cord to the gipsy, who was waiting without, the sacks were severally raised to the top of the wall by Burrows, and gently lowered on the other side by Dillon, who quickly followed them, when they were placed in a donkey-cart, and soon secured within the cavern in the chalk pit.

The gipsy was delighted to find that he had acquired in Dillon so active a coadjutor, and already began to look forward to better quarters and better fare, which was his ultimatum, never having heard the notable saying of Socrates to a certain epicurean—“One would think that thou believest happiness to consist in good eating and drinking. I, for my part, am of opinion that to have need of nothing at all is a divine perfection; and that to have need but of little, is to approach very near the Deity*." Burrows had no

* Xenophon, Memorabilia, B. I.

ambition for anything like divine perfection, and knew of no good upon earth, save brandy, tobacco, and a plentiful board. All his notions of happiness were absorbed in these few gross gratifications.

After this successful adventure, the Hobgoblin retired to his straw, where he slept soundly until he was roused by the gipsy mother, who came to remind him that the booty had better be disposed of before the vicar should discover his loss. He rose, and looked out upon the common. The air was sharp, but the dawn had ushered in a bright and almost unclouded sky. There were small glittering icicles upon every spray. He cried exultingly, for he had occasionally read Shakspeare as well as his Bible

"See how the morning opes her golden gates, And takes her farewell of the glorious sun! How well resembles it the prime of youth, Trimm'd like a younker prancing to his love!*" Before the sun had well risen, the whole of the fruit had been disposed of for a fourth of its value, and was on its road to London. Specimens of it soon appeared in the windows of some of the first fruiterers in the metropolis, who made at least cent. per cent. upon their purchase, while the original venders were well content with at least nine-tenths less than the ultimate sale produced.

Our hero now led a very indolent life for several weeks, during which time he engaged only in a few petty larcenies; but these he considered altogether unworthy of his character among the élite of his profession in London. He was not, however, altogether

• Henry VI., Part 3.

free from some of the most annoying of "those natural ills this flesh is heir to." It happened that he had incurred the hatred of the beldame to whom the gipsy owed his being, and whose acerbity of temper was equalled only by the rancour of her foul and hideous soul. Old as she was, she possessed not a trait of character to render her age venerable, or to kindle a spark of human sympathy. An old brindled cat, blind with age, and troublesome from disease, purred in her tawny bosom, and seemed the only living being that could sympathise with the frequently furious outpourings of her atramental and disorganised spirit.

She was a loathsome hag with age grown double,
Her eyes with scalding rheum were gall'd and red,
Cold palsy shook her head, her hand seemed wither'd
And on her crooked shoulders had she wrapp'd
The tatter'd remnants of an old strip'd hanging
Which serv'd to keep her carcass from the cold,
So there was nothing of a piece about her.
Her lower weeds were all o'er coarsely patch'd
With different colour'd rags, black, red, white, yellow,

And seem'd to speak variety of wretchedness.

Of no one might it be more truly said, "the poison of asps was under her lips," and from the moment that Jemmy Dillon became an inmate of her son's abode, she acted towards him with a hostility perfectly demoniacal. Not being readily alarmed, he treated her with an indifference that only added fuel to the fire of her hate; and this was aggravated in a tenfold degree, when she thought she discovered that his eyes wandered towards the lovely Phoebe with an expression that told the reflection of her image had reached his heart.

SYPHAX.

I CAN conceive nothing finer than the situation of Naples. The view from the bay is superb. The city rises like an amphitheatre; the foreground broken and diversified by the old castle, the arsenal, the lanterna, and the mole-shut in on one side by the bold and beautiful promontory of Prosolipo, and on the other stretching for miles round its sweeping shore, for Portici, and Resina, and the white villas scattered at the foot of Vesuvius, and Torre del Greco and dell' Anunciata, look like a suburb of palaces; the heights above the city crowned by the dark and threatening St. Elmo; towers, or villas, or hanging gardens scattered on all its eminences; the brown barren cone of Vesuvius standing fearfully at the foot of the bay, with its dark streams of

desolation marking their course amidst a profusion of luxuriant vegetation; the indented, and finely varied coast of Vico and Sorento on the opposite side, with the bluest of blue mountains rising sublime in the distance; the bay itself sheltered and adorned by the interesting promontory of Micenus; by Procida, Ischia, and Capri, the most picturesque of islands;-this is a scene that may be equalled but can never be surpassed; that must be felt, but cannot be described: mine is its mere topography, and you may send it to the Gentleman's if you please.

Naples must be a delightful city for an intellectual idler. The scenery wants nothing but fine wood to be perfect; and I am not sure that fine wood would harmonise with it.

The climate is delicious-I know nothing of the sirocco for I have felt nothing; to me the air, as Duncan says, "smells wooingly." The home scene, its Toledo, its Piazza del Castello, and its Mole, are a perpetual carnivala five act farce,-a leaf out of Rabelais or Ben Jonson, which he that runs may read. The walks and drives have all the variety, and more than all the beauty of other beautiful places, with recollections exclusively their own, and natural phenomena, that has everlasting speculation in it.

I confess the Syren has subdued me, and to tell the truth, I have idled monstrously on the old Mole, and the Piazza del Castello, and passed half my time among the vagabonds there. I can conceive that the climate may make the difference between the Toledo and Regent Street, but ages mark the difference between the everlasting pantomime of the Mole, and any thing in England. Such life may have been even in England, when it was merry England; the old dramatists, and some of Dekker's odd volumes, give credence to this opinion; an imagined scene in Alsatia or the Broad Sanctuary, or Coleman street, on a fair or a festival day, may illustrate it; but in England it must ever have been a scene or sort of bye-play; while the Mole at Naples is a universal Gull's Horn Book. Such groups of merry mad devils in one corner; such philosophical and grave faces in another, all attention to a prosy tale-teller; such gaping at the infallible elixirs distributing by a Septimus-Septimus; and then such confusion in all the groups, such stripping, leaping, diving, when a few coppers were thrown into the water;-why when they knew me, which they very soon did, I was afraid of feeling for my snuff-box, lest I should unbreech half Naples. Let those that talk of swimming come here: I once thought I could swim, but I have never but once plunged into this splendid sea out of mere shame and vexation:-an Englishman goes to it with a sort of shudder; he has an eternal consciousness of cramp, and of being tickled under the short ribs by the grapling irons of the Humane Society: after his first plunge he comes up puffing, and blowing, and gaping, and groping, and blind and stupid, like Lazzarillo de Tormes when he unwillingly played the sea-monster in the fisherman's water-butt; while these fellows give their head a shake, and call for more coppers. The sea is a sort of natural home to them; and I am ready to believe, if any man assert it, that they sleep there on wet nights. I know not what travellers mean by abus

ing the Lazzaroni; if their nakedness offend, give them clothes, and they will wear them; if they are hungry looking fellows, give them macaroni, and see who cries off first; if you stumble over them in the dark streets or door ways at night, ask them to walk in and take a bed, and see if they will refuse; if they are idlers give them work, and they will thank you; if they are cheats, misfortune has made them so, they live by cheating their own natures; if they are buffoons, God made them so; action is their natural language; it is not the grace of ornament, as with the " old man eloquent," but a substitute for language itself. When our first acquaintance here desired to satisfy us of the reasonableness of his two crown charge for removing the luggage, he alluded to the trust reposed in him, the consequences of a breach of trust; but he did not tell this, he acted it; and I laughed outright when I saw him grinning and shivering, and playing the miserable, and peeping through his own out-stretched five fingers, to represent the horrors and the iron-grating of a prison. Humour, and good-humour are the essential differences between the Lazzaroni and the superabundant population of other great cities; between them and the beggars of London, the "Jacks" at the water-side, and the blackguards who sleep on brick-kilns in the suburbs. The Lazzaroni are joyous and happy, when they have a just right to be sad and savage: they most resemble an occasional group of the blue-stockings at the corner of Oxford Street; but here they are all merry, and not so pugnacious. They do not, as with us, and so much the worse perhaps politically, look on themselves as a degraded, but as a distinct class: poverty indeed can be no shame where thousands claim respect for professing it; begging is not disgraceful where we take off our hats to the scoundrels who call themselves followers of St. Francis. Mind I do not pretend to be critical, or to distinguish between the veritable lazzari, and the vagabonds, though such distinctions are made I well know; I include all the idlers on the Mole, or the Mercato, and the other places where the lower classes congregate. As to there being forty thousand that never enter a bed, or sleep under a roof, I suspect it is an exaggeration. A bed, indeed, is not the essential thing at Naples that it is in London, and where a man has but half what his necessities require, he is not likely to waste much upon luxuries. I saw one group of about twenty stowed away under the large balcony of a ground-floor. It was not more

than nine o'clock, and promised to be, and was, a desperately wet night, and they had retired early, I suspect, to secure one of the best beds in Naples.

When tired of these merry fellows, my delight has not always been to walk in the Villa Reale, unequalled as it is, but in the dark intricacies of the old town. There is more entertainment in one such walk, than in the five acts of a modern comedy. A stranger at Naples is saved all trouble of inquiring into the domestic habits of the common people, for they have none; their house is a mere sleeping place, their dwell ing is the public streets; there, are their tables and chairs; there, is the carpenter's bench and the shoemaker's stool and lap-stoneI think I have seen more than a hundred of these latter at work in one street. In the streets, indeed, the common people eat, and drink, and dress, and work; there, he that has a dinner of his own cooks it; and there, is the cook's-shop for others; chestnuts, beans, fish, macaroni are frying, boiling, broiling at every corner; and there, are the little temple-looking stands, so fine, so tasty, and really so pretty and full of fanciful conceits and ornament, of the iced-water sellers. I know no finer sight than half a dozen of the Lazzaroni, with a few superior labourers intermixt, standing, at night, round a boiling cauldron of macaroni, "the strong reflection of the pile lighting their dark lineaments," some, like Subtle, making a meal of the steam; others with face glowing and burnished by the glare, with

head thrown back, and mouth gaping, swallowing it by the yard; others, more epicurean, parting at the next stall with their last grani for a bunch of grapes, or a pomegranate, or a glass of iced-water, and all merry, and all happy.

You have a feeling, as you wander about in the old town, that every thing belongs to what we call the past; that its chymistry is alchymy, its philosophy is Aristotelian, that astronomy here means astrology, and that religion itself is but the mysteries of Platonism. You expect to see Mathlai, Tarmiel, and Baraborat,' written in mystical characters over shop doors. There is a pervading truth in all nature, and there must be a learning corresponding to the ignorance; and what other could pass current here. I wanted to ask every man in black if he were a Thomist or a Scotist-for the Jansenists and Molinists seem a contemptible sect of yesterday, like our Southcotonians-to discuss with him the question of pre-existence, the locality of Eden, or that case of conscience which just now troubles me, how the Lazzaroni eat their macaroni in Lent, seeing forks are unknown, and men, as Othello says, have" greasy palms."

I have said thus much of the sublime scenery which surrounds the city, and of the strange people who inhabit it-because cities have a distinctive character as well as men, and it is this individuality which most interests us. In other things Naples resembles other cities, and is inferior to many-but I will go more into particulars in my next.