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there is not any thing in the present volume so full of deep interest and pathos as the "Pride of the Village," or so exquisitely humorous as the story of "Rip Van Winkle,"- "Annette Delarbre" and the "Stagecoach Romance," are only inferior to those earlier effusions of the same genius, and are in all respects worthy descendants of the same illustrious stock. Among the longest of these narrative sketches is the "Student of Salamanca," a romantic Spanish love-tale, containing a superabundance of fine things, rich descriptions, and hair-breadth escapes; garnished with the mysterious character and studies of an alchymist, the terrors of the Inquisition, and the glories of an auto-da-fé: And in winding up the complicated incidents of this piece, the author strikingly evinces the vigorous efforts he is determined to make, that all may, at every hazard, end well. "Annette Delarbre," though not so lengthy, nor so much laboured, is more touchingly beautiful: it describes the long mournful progress of a hopeless affection in a female bosom, embit tered by feelings of remorse for the unkind treatment of her devoted lover, till the powers of reason sink before the violence of her passion, and madness benumbs the consciousness of the anguish which nothing can remove. But, in concluding, the same bonhommie is again displayed; the hero returns in safety, Annette is restored to the use of her faculties, and to the arms of her forgiving and affectionate Eugene, and the reader is comfortably assured, on the word of a worthy priest, that they have been happily married, and that a handsomer or lovelier couple is not any where to be seen. "The Stout Gentleman, a Stage-coach Romance," is a most humorous satire on those writers of the Radcliffe school who delight in investing their personages with darkness and mystery; and "Dolph Heyliger," from the manuscript of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, exhibits all the grotesque naïf drollery of that most witty of historians. Upon the whole, we can safely recommend this work, as containing a rich store of pure unalloyed enjoyment. The partialities and leanings of the author are all in favour of

goodness of character, simplicity of manners, and refined, yet natural feeling; and we consider it also peculiarly deserving our recommendation, as a work likely to be extensively read by the youth of both sexes, whose unchilled sensibilities lead them, in particular, to delight in such Utopian scenes of gay romance, and to sympathize with those somewhat too flattering representations of humanity, with which he has peopled them; especially as those writings which possess the same sort of interest are very rarely so innocuous and moral in their tendency.

A TRUE AND AUTHENTIC HISTORY
OF
ILL TAM."
No. VI.

HUMAN happiness is the result, not of apathy or inactivity, or of that "Nil admirari" of the poet, which, according to his ironical statement, is the only thing which can render and continue a man happy. The fact is, that we are happy, not in proportion to the fewness of our desires, or of the means of gratifying them; but precisely in an inverse ratio, in respect of all innocent desires and gratifications, at least. The oyster drinks in the sea-water, closes its shell, and is satisfied. The sloth gorges, drops, and then whines itself, through repletion, into a comfortable state of torpidity. The ox grazes, seeks the stream, and ruminates at ease, in the midst of the meadow-grass. The shepherd's cur clears the laggins of his master's " cog," licks the rainwater from his feet, reposes on his plaid-corner,-and has not a desire unsatisfied. Man alone is possessed of appetites and desires of a more elevated and varied cast; and in proportion as he extends, multiplies, and strengthens these, (under such limitations, always, as reason and good feeling prescribe,) in an equal proportion will be his enjoyment of life, his perception of that pleasure and delight, of which he is created so eminently susceptible. Why is youth, in particular, so capable of exqui

"Paucity," says the critic. "Fewness," says my Uncle. Go on!

site, and almost ceaseless enjoyment? Why is every passing hour furnished with the means of eliciting from the young heart the breathings and affections of happiness? Why! but from this cause, that the whole frame and endowments, both of head and heart-both of imagination and sympathy, are then plastic, and capable of being acted upon from every contiguous relationship. There exists an exciting, and arousing, and arresting novelty, and freshness, and strength, in every impression; combined with, and accommodated to a corresponding capability of apprehension in, and over his whole system. A boy is a kind of moving barometer, acted upon, and indicating the influence of every element around him. He is fond of novelty; the world, up from the wood in and through which his infancy ranged, to the uttermost descry of an extensive horizon, is before and around him. He delights in variety; it is the game he is constantly endeavouring to start, and ever at the same time hunting down. There are games enow in the list of school amusements, to meet and satisfy this urgent and clamorous propensity. He is always in earnest; he enters into every thing about which he is occupied, with a singleness of heart, with a keenness and alacrity which are peculiar to his years. This disposition, likewise, is met by a corresponding enthusiasm in his fellows, and by a kind of virgin entireness and adaptedness, in the yet-unhackneyed objects of pursuit and enjoyment. He is always pushing, as it were, against the bars and the limits of restriction; and is apt, if the legitimate sources of enjoyment be denied him, to overleap the boundary, and to run wild in unlawful pastures; hence it follows, that whoever has in reality added one innocent and allowable, and gratifiable taste or affection, to the amount of his desires and pursuits, has, in reality, added to the sum of his happiness in a twofold interpretation, both in reference to the mischief prevented, and the benefit attained. It is for this reason that I am led to regard the taste which about this time I acquired for "Fishing," as well as the friendship which I imbibed for the

VOL. XI.

humble individual through whose example and instructions that taste was induced and continued, as fortunate occurrences; and although obstructive, for the time, of my studies, and altogether incompatible with maternal authority, yet still, as opening up a new and a refreshing spring of healthful and exhilarating exercises.

Fishing, or angling with the rod, for burn-trouts, is indeed a most interesting amusement. There is just enough of address required to admit and imply a gratifying admixture of self-approbation; and enough, at the same time, of chance or circumstance, over which the fisher has no control, to keep expectation constantly alive, even in the midst of the most deplorable fortune. Hence, a real fisher is seldom found, from a want of success merely, to relinquish his rod in disgust; but, with the true Christian, is patient in tribulation-rejoicing in hope: "Meliora spero" is the motto of his profession; and whilst mischance and misfortune haunt him, it may be, from stream to stream, and from pool to pool, he still looks adown the glen, and along the river's course he still regards, in anxious expectation, the alluring and more promising curl, the circulating and creamy froth, the suddenly-broken and hesitating gullet, and the dark, clayey bank, under which the water runs thick, and the foam bells figure bright and starry. He knows, that one single hour of successful adventure, when the cloud has ascended, and the shadow is deep, and the breeze comes upwards in the face of the stream, and the whole finny race are in eager expectation of the approaching shower, he knows that a single hour of this description will often, even down to the evening's close, repay him amply for a whole day of discouragement and misfor

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your view? Your fishing-rod is sufficient, your line is in order, your hook is ready to pierce your very fingers, in the putting on of the bait. Companion, thank God, with the exception of the raven or the waterwag-tail, you have none. This is no hour for chirping grasshopper, or flaunting butterfly, or booming bee; the overshaded and ruffled water receives your bait with a plump, and ere it has travelled to the distance of six feet, it is nailed down in the wiel of a current stone, or has cut (against all the laws of hydrostatics) and cleaved the wave upwards, or has shot suddenly out at right angles with the river's course into brow-hold and dark-retired lodgement. You pull, recklessly and fearlessly, and directly in towards yourself; and flash after flash, flap after flap, comes there directly upon your breast, and your arms, and your legs, the well-formed, firm-made, spotted inmate of the waters. At length your direct pull is resisted, you make it sideways; and out upon your stretch rushes the giant of the flood, indignant, capricious, ungovernable-making as if earth, air, and water, were alike his elements, and putting all your address and management fairly and fully to the test. By the tenacity, however, of your tackle, and the unremitted perseverance of your pull, he is at last fairly worn out--his jaws open -you hold his head to the stream, and in a rushing overflow of his own native element, he is actually drowned, and dragged flat, and lumbering, and lifeless, to the beach.

Or it is "the fly" with which you are enjoying the river's fuller and more sea-ward flow. The wide extent of streamy pool is before you, and beyond your reach; fathom after fathom is pulled out, reeling from your pirn; but still you can scarcely drop the far fly into the tempting curl. The very tide boils with the play of trout-raising, as you gently and slowly bring your hooks homeward; but they come not home to you troutless; for, in addition to that tiny "par," which only embarrasses the greater movement, you have to contend with a pair of as yellow sides and broad lateral fins as it is convenient to overpower. Revolution after revolution is made at the bottom,

mid-way up, and at top of the flood, the "par" still holding a kind of satellite course around the larger and central attraction, and both bodies tending, by the gravitating power of a multiplying pirn, towards the shore. Scarcely a throw is made without success, till the creel-strap begins to cut your shoulder, and your bloody and gleeted fingers indicate an unusual extent of slaughter.

But even independently of the sport itself, all-bewitching to a true fisher as it unquestionably is, the concomitants and associations with which it is usually combined, are all of an elevating, invigorating, and heartexpanding nature. The resort of the fisher is amidst the retirements, of what, and what alone, can be justly denominated undegraded Nature.The furnace, and the manufactory, and the bleaching-green, and the tall, red, smoke-vomiting chimney, are his utter aversion and abhorrence. The village-the clachanthe city-all congregations of the dwellings and pursuits of men, he carefully avoids-he flies from them as from a spirit and a presence entirely inimical to his soul's life, and hope, and joy. He holds no communion, no voluntary intercourse with man, or with his petty and insignificant achievements: "he lifts his eyes to the hills," to these eternal and unchangeable, uncivilized, unsophisticated harbingers of God; and his steps lie through retired glen, and winding vale, and smiling strath, up to the misty eminence, and shieling-topped peak. He catches the first beams of the sun, not through the dim and disfiguring smoke of a city, but over the sparkling and diamonded spret, and above the unbroken and undulating line of the distant horizon. Again and again he imagines that the cloud streak which intersects and overlays the sun's ascending disk, actually destroys its rotundity; and whilst he looks away the oblong into the circular form, his line sparkles in the slanting beam, and his rod is pieced and prepared for the day's sport. He becomes acquainted, not only with earth, in all the freshness and attractiveness of Nature, but his "conversation is with Heaven;" he holds communion with the mist and with the wind-and with the

cloud-and with the sky. No varie ties of temperature, or perceptible indications of atmospheric change escape him. He discovers the small cloud like the man's hand, which is soon to swell, and spread, and advance into a deluge; and he descries the almost imperceptible "blue-bore" in the west, which, under the most unpromising appearances, announces fair weather. He detects the thunder in his gleamy, and inflated, and towering wreaths of snow,-knows, from the hesitating and upward-bearing of the wind, from what quarter of the heavens the storm will set inand even in the croaking of the raven, the wheeling and mid-air suspense of the hawk, and the bleating and raking of the hill flocks, he can read prognostics of the approaching tempest. The great, and the unmeasured, and the incomprehensible, are around, and about, and within him. The stillness of solitude settles down upon his perceptions, and his imagination and feelings come into contact and combination with a presence and a power of infinity and peace. When patients are sent to Pitcaithly, or to sea-bathing quarters, their convalescence is more attributable, perhaps, to a temporary removal from the cares and the disquietudes of business, and every-day thoughts, than to any virtue in the residence, or in the waters; and when a fisher has ascended to the source of the mountain and moss-born stream, the little world he left behind him in the plain beneath, is as completely banished, in all its carping and vexing influence, from his thoughts, as if with his altered position he had likewise changed his nature.

Much, indeed, O fascinating, but most innocent and uncloying Amusement, do I owe thee! Thou hast been to me the green exuberance of sunny enjoyment during my boyhood-thou hast mixed thy softening and soothing attractions with the sterner and

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indispensable avocations of my manhood! When worn out by disease, and jaded, and tossed, and jarred, in all my more entire and intense affections,-by what shall I call it? the world, or the world's companions, Disappointment and Misfortune, thou hast never deserted or betrayed me. When Conscience has risen up against me, armed with the scorpions of Memory, and the inveteracy of Regretwhen my soul was almost ready to avoid a perception of its own intense misery, by a leap, and a dive, and precipitation of utter destiny,-thou hast taken me by the hand-whispered in my ear-conducted me into the wilderness, and tempted me into endurance, quiet, peace, comfort. When the hand of God has been upon me, and the staff, and the stay, and the solace, and "the joy," has been removed, and suddenly-when the lapse of a few hours has given me to know the uttermost boundary of a reversing and an afflictive Providence, and I have been driven forth companionless into the duties, friendless into the privileges, and without an associated sympathy into the enjoyments of existence; thou hast been ever nigh at hand, watching, and waiting to be consolatory; withdrawing me from my present, and reverting my attention to my former self. In the still, small voice of persuasive influence, rousing me into activity, and attaching me anew to the world, and to the life and the pursuits I had almost resolved to relinquish,—and for ever!

I shall never forget the circumstances which led to my initiation into all the mysteries of angling. I had found a sixpence upon the kirkroad, along which I passed towards school. With this piece of money, which felt all day as if it were burning its escape through the bottom of my pocket, I purchased, after schoolhours, and at the expence of a threemile walk, a penknife, with a smoothly polished joint-an amazing "back sprent," which clicked audibly as the knife shut, and a hartshorn haft, which had actually figured on the head of a real deer. As I was on my return homewards, dinnerless, and cutting to the very quick with hunger, yet stopping, from time to time, to unpocket, and open out my

prize, to blow upon the blade, and try the edge upon my thumb ball, I discovered a class-fellow upon the banks of a stream, amusing himself with a fishing-rod; and ere I had stood three minutes awaiting his success, I beheld, what I then considered as a trout of uncommon dimensions, panting, and flapping, and walloping at my feet. A bargain was immediately concluded betwixt us, without the help of attorney or witness, but simply by means of moistened thumbs pressed closely together, in virtue of which, I got rid of my recent purchase, and was enabled to palm this extraordinary fish upon my mother and aunts, as one of my own catching. Having thus, like the blood-hound, moistened my lips, I could not rest nor settle into any regular study, till I had tried my fortune at a somewhat distant, but farnoted stream, then, and still known, by the royal appellation of the "King-stand burn:" so stealing, for the occasion, my mother's thin oval and tin-made tobacco-box, and lodging a worm or two of the largest and most ruddy colour and dimensions within; arming myself with a crooked pin, in lieu of a fish-hook-with a piece of rosined thread for a lineand with a rowen-tree branch for a fishing rod-off I marched betimes, setting home, and mother, and school, and master, and duty, and conscience at defiance. I bounded over the soft and spongy moss, till the water squirted upon my face from betwixt my toes, and the whole of my lower person was completely drenched in the long and still dewy heather; and no sooner had I reached the source of the "King-stand," and had unfolded my line amidst the old peat hags, where the Covenanter and the foumart had formerly held their rendezvous, than, upon discovering a black and stagnant pool, my bait, and hook, and line, descended into the abyss, and I could see the worm gradually, and under a yellow dusky hue, gravitating its way towards the bottom. I sat for a few seconds, in the most distressing stretch of expectation, watching my line, as a shipwrecked sailor would eye the rope which connects him with the shore, when, to my utter amazement, motion succeeded to rest.

The line evidently quivered; there was a circular-there was a lateral

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there was an unequal-there was a quick and angular movement. felt my whole frame quiver; it was not fear, nor joy, nor hope, nor suspense, which dealt with me, as the earthquake deals with "Comrie:" but it was a combination of all these, under the overruling influence of some still deeper and more awful sentiment. I ventured to pull at last, and with so determined a good will, that, in a few instants, a large unseemly adder-looking "eel" had taken possession of the spretty marsh, and was contriving to wind its way, in most suspicious activity, amidst the long and moving grass. For eels of every description, whether "lamper," with the horseshoe mouth and lateral tiers of eyes, or whether the more common blueback and sow-mane, I entertained an innate and decided abhorrence: a kind of creeping shuddering grew" invariably came over my whole frame upon sight of them, and I would sooner have handled a red-hot "harsel," than have brought my fingers into contact with any part of the detested reptile. I tried, but in vain, to extricate the pin from the possessor's jaws, or rather stomach; I at length gathered resolution to place my feet upon its head; but by means of a cold and clammy length, and agility of tail, it encircled, in an instant, my ankle, and, wrested its nobler part into freedom. In this situation, I would willingly have compounded for a mutual cessation of hostilities, but I had caught a tartar; my leg continued entangled in the slimy, crawling folds, and I was glad to cut my cables, and drift; in other words, to take to my heels, without either fishing-rod or line, and endeavouring, by sheer kicking and screaming, to disengage myself from this tenacious and dangling impediment.

Thus was I compelled to return from my first fishing excursion, somewhat of a greater fool than I had set out. But perseverance is the drop which hollows the stone-the "tempus edax rerum,"--the woman in the parable who obtained by her very importunity. I had acquired one species of information by this expedition,

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