But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium-all the strange combinations which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost-forgotten Edwin. Oh for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke! A season or two since there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far short of the former.

There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one it is!) of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down, and call his. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks in unaccountable warfare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not so much a comedian as a company. If his name could be multiplied like his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faces; applied to any other person, the phrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human countenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river-horse; or come forth a pewet, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis.

I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry-in Old Dornton-diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began and must end with himself.

Can any man wonder like him? can any man see ghosts like him? or fight with his own shadow—“ SESSA"- -as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Prestonwhere his alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were be ing acted before him? Who like him can throw, or ever at

tempted to throw, a preternatural interest over the commonest daily-life objects? A table, or a joint-stool, in his conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It is invested with constellatory importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in an old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him.

BLAKESMOOR IN HSHIRE.

I Do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy; and contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance but some present human frailty—an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory-or a trait of affectation, or, worse, vainglory, on that of the preacher-puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness?—go alone on some weekday, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church; think of the piety that has kneeled there-the congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there-the meek pastor-the docile parishioner With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee.

Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles out of my road to.look upon the remains of an old great house with which I had been impressed in this way in

What, else, were the families of the great to us? wha pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent elevation?

Or wherefore, else, oh tattered and diminished 'scutcheon that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters—thy emblematic supporters, with their prophetic "Resurgam"-till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself very gentility? Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and of nights hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee.

This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion.

Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not, I inquire not; but its fading rags, and colours cobweb-stained, told that its subject was of two centuries

back.

And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damætas -feeding flocks not his own upon the hills of Lincoln-did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud Ægon?-repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped in his lifetime upon my poor pastoral progenitor.

If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to sooth my vanity.

I was the true descendant of those old W-s; and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places.

Mine, was that gallery of good old family portraits, which, as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one-and then another-would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvass, to recognise the new relationship; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity.

That beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb-that hung next the great bay window-with the bright yellow H -shire hair, and eye of watchet hue-so like my Alice!-I am persuaded she was a true Elia-Mildred Elia, I take it.

Mine, too, BLAKESMOOR, was thy noble marble hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Cesars-stately busts in marble-ranged round: of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder; but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet fresh ness of immortality.

Mine, too, thy lofty justice hall, with its one chair of au thority, high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher or self-forgetful maiden-so common since, that bats have roosted in it.

Mine, too-whose else?-thy costly fruit-garden. with its sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backward from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring woodpigeon, with that antique image in the centre, god or goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery.

Was it for this that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol worship, walks and windings of BLAKESMOOR! for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there may be a hope-a germe to be revivified.

POOR RELATIONS.

A POOR relation-is the most irrelevant thing in nature-> piece of impertinent correspondency-an odious approximation-a haunting conscience-a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity-an unwelcome remembrancer-a perpetually-recurring mortification-a drain on your purse-a more intolerable dun upon your pride-a drawback upon success-a rebuke to your rising-a stain in your blood-a blot on your scutcheon-a rent in your garment-a death's head at your banquet-Agathocles' pot-a Mordecai in your gate-a Lazarus at your door-a lion in

your path—a frog in your chamber-a fly in your ointmenta mote in your eye-a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends-the one thing not needful-the hail in harvest -the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet.

He is known by his knock.

Your heart telleth you “That is Mr. A rap, between familiarity and respect; that demands, and, at the same time, seems to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling, and-embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and-draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time-when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have company-but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visiter's two children are accommodated at a side table. He never cometh upon open days, when your wife says with some complacency, "My dear, perhaps Mr. will drop in to-day." He remembereth birthdays-and professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against

fish, the turbot being small-yet suffereth himself to be importuned into a slice against his first resolution. He sticketh by the port-yet will be prevailed upon to empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil enough, to him. The guests think “they have seen him before." Every one speculateth upon his condition; and the most part take him to be-a tide waiter. He calleth you by your Christian name, to imply that his other is the same with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity he might pass for a casual dependant; with more boldness he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent-yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, that your guests take him for one. is asked to make one at the whist-table; refuseth on the score

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of poverty, and-resents being left out. When the company break up, he proffereth to go for a coach-and lets the servant go. He recollects your grandfather; and will thrust in some mean and quite unimportant anecdote of the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as "he is blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to institute what he calleth-favourable comparisons. With a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will inquire the price of your furni ture; and insults you with a special commendation of your window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape, but, after all, there was something more com