island a writer of unquestionable talents. Even so with our present author, who writes like a scholar and a gentleman, and, when the subject admits of it, also absolutely like a poet. We have heard different names mentioned, but we are always reluctant to mention people's names in this Magazine, and therefore shall now say, in the words of Moore, "O breathe not his name!" "Oh no, we never mention him!" in case we should commit some mistake, and "rob Peter to pay Paul.”

THE LOVES OF THE POETS.1

[SEPTEMBER 1829.}

AMONG the multitude of sins set down to our score by Whigs and Whiglings, Radicals, and all sorts of other rascals, it has sometimes surprised us that there never has been included brutality to women. We insult men before their faces, and then off and away up to the top of a sixteenth story, where, without many ladders, it is in vain to hope to reach us the trembling coward. We stab men behind their backs, and on turning round, before they breathe their last, to kill their assassin, they have merely time left to see a monster in a mask (us), jinking round a corner. The police are on the unalert; and the murderer makes his escape to that accursed sanctuary -Ambrose's Hotel. It must, we think, be matter of wonder to the wise and candid part of the population of these realms, -if there be any truth in the above charges, that We have hitherto escaped-Hanging. Burke and Hare, Hazlitt says in the Examiner, were, in comparison with us, as pure as snow, or his own reputation; and that Mr and Mrs Stewart should dangle and die for simply poisoning some single halfscore of elderly people addicted to inebriety, while We leap and live like a two-year-old, is to the pious Mr Leigh Hunt a juggle in Providence.

This is one side of the question-the side considered by the Cockneys. Now look at the other, the side contemplated by Christians. Never once, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, did we insult any human creature before his face, and then up to a skylight among a Thread of Tailors. In insulting a human creature we walk up to him behind, and lend him a kick sufficient in America to shove a wooden house across the street. 1 The Loves of the Poets, by Mrs JAMESON. 2 Vols. Colburn.

Head-over-heels goes the numbskull; and how can the most credulous believe for a moment that we do, or the most ingenious contrive to themselves for a moment a reason why we should, run away from the sprawling Jackass? So far from running away, why, we uniformly stop-often to our very great inconvenience to pick him up, and reinstate him on his former level. We do not indeed absolutely help with our own hands -that would be too much to expect to rub him down, but we compassionate him, and advise him, as his best friends, to leave off in future all such evil habits. To aver that we laugh at the plight to which he has, by a long course of obstinate folly, finally brought himself, to the grief and despair, perhaps, of no very disreputable family, is a vile calumny; for though we seldom, indeed never, shed tears at such accidents, we always experience that inward sorrow which the good feel at the miseries even of the most weak and wicked ; and sweeter far it is to us to see the Kickee reformed, and thenceforth leading a humble and honest life, than to have to repeat the application, seldom wholly bootless, to his impenitent posteriors.

With regard, again, to stabbing human creatures behind their backs, and then like monsters in masks jinking round corners—all we have to say is this, that it is a d- -d lie. Do you call killing a Cockney before his face (a most absurd one, you may well believe, and not even “rescued by thought from insignificance") stabbing a human creature behind his back? If you do, then pardon us for surmising that you believe the sun sets in the east, and rises from the west in a blaze of glory. After killing a Cockney, why run away, and more especially in a mask? Let the fair deed be perpetrated at noonday, and on a crowded street, not a human creature will seek to detain you; and we need not dwell on the shocking want of feeling, and indeed of common courtesy, that would be exhibited by the Christian who, on extinguishing a Cockney, were to conceal his features from the laudatory eyes of the delighted spectators.

Should the above reasoning be in the slightest degree unsatisfactory to any of our numerous readers from Kirkwall to Cockaigne, let him have the goodness to circulate a lithographic list of the names of the human creatures whom, behind and be

fore backs, we have slain or insulted, and then sought refuge from the vengeance of the heroic living, or the still more heroic dead, in an ignominious flight. In what churchyard were they buried? In what garret do they yet eat their leek?

As to running away, Heaven pity us all, what speed could be expected from a martyr to the gout? Half-a-mile an hour at the most, with the King of the Cockneys, like the swiftfooted Achilles, with all his Miss-Molly-Myrmidons at our heels! A mask! Poo! it is all a radical superstition, arising out of the circumstance of our being obliged, in the Tent, to wear a gauze veil, framed by the fair fingers of Mrs Gentle, to ward off the midges. Our names! How could we conceal our names-long known to the uttermost parts of the Earth ? Even in Terra Incognita we are not anonymous.

The plain matter of fact is, that we insult and slay-nobody. Sometimes, when we meet an ass, who, in the March of Intellect, is faithless to his natural love of Thistles by the roadside, and is not contented till he is cutting capers in a flower-garden, like Love among the Roses, or treading down cornfields or vineyards, whereby much bread and wine is prevented from cheering the hearts of men, we take him by the tail, or ears, and do drag or kick him-we shall not, ought not, cannot deny it-out of the enclosure, and in conclusion, off the premises. Call you that insulting a human creature before his face, and then running away to Ambrose's? Observe, too, that we drag or kick him, tail or ear-ways, 66 as gently as if we loved him. The truth is, we do love him, although he be such an ass as not to know it; for were the poor braying animal to be suffered to eat his fill, and afterwards to get at water, why, he would burst, and then his death would be laid at our door, and all Cockaigne would cry out that we had killed King Cuddy.

But where is the MAN whom we ever slew or insulted? Nowhere. Many men we have occasionally smiled-laughed -guffaw'd at-such as Bowles, Moore, Wordsworth, and a few others who have "given the world assurance they are men." But they know well it was all for the good of their immortal souls and poems; and done partly from an inferior motive, to shove them through a ridescent world into a Tenth Edition.

So much for our general treatment of those human creatures called Men; and how have we behaved to those human creatures-if they will allow us to call them so—who rejoice in the name of women? As follows: Old women of that sex we venerate for their years and wisdom; all middle-aged women we announce to be Fat, Fair, and Forty, sensible, and sagacious; all young women to be-what more would you, loveliest and most adorable of God's creatures, have us to say?—angels. If she sit at home, like Xarifa, in Mr Lockhart's beautiful Spanish Ballad, so beautifully set to music by Mrs Arkwright, and so beautifully sung by Mr Akebowme, weaving golden flowers on white silk cushions, we tell the whole world, both in prose and verse, that she is lovelier than any Zegri Ladye that ever darkly bloomed in the gårdens of Granada. If she sit at home, sewing shirts or darning stockings, we exclaim, there is the "Light and Shadow of Scottish Life" for our love and money, and long to be chanting with her the duet of our own epithalamium. If she sit at home, twisting tartlets and trifle into such fair fantastic shapes as the soul of Genius alone could conceive, and the hand of Taste alone could execute, we think of Eve, yet virgin in Paradise, preparing for Adam a light déjeûné on his nuptial morn; and if here comes the rub-she sit at home reading-nay, writing, and send her inspiration to Blackwood, or Murray, or Colburnoh! then, by the cerulean skies, we swear that her stockings are "more deeply, darkly, beautifully blue," than the heaven we call to witness the sincerity-the sanctity, of our admiration, yet declare, in the delightful lines of Wordsworth, that she

"Is a creature not too bright and good
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,

Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.

Of small moment, perhaps, may it be what we think, feel, say, or do, now, of, or to the fair sex, young or old, virgin or nupt,

"Old as we are, for Lady's love unfit."

Yet we cannot imagine any sight more worthy of affectionate admiration, than that of a gouty, old, arm-chair-ridden man,