inconsistent hopes of honour and prosperity, age and experience generally bring a tardy wisdom. But that wisdom often comes too late. If the object of desire be at length found decidedly unattainable, existence is wasted in a sluggish contempt of present duties; the spirit is broken; the temper is soured; habits of misanthropy and personal neglect creep on; and life eventually becomes a most tedious and miserable pilgrimage of never-satisfied desires. We need not stop to enforce, at any length, the advantages of an opposite conduct. Who has not seen the delightful contrast of an intelligent mechanic or tradesman industrious and contented, -neither forgetting his duties to society and his family, nor regardless of the cultivation of his own peculiar enjoyments; dignifying his hours of leisure with the cultivation of his mind, and confining those abilities to the improvement and pleasure of his family, which might fail in their reward were they incautiously exposed to public view? This is the useful and happy citizen!

We hardly know how to address those whose errors and misfortunes are derived from a misplaced sensibility. There is so much of disease in the composition of their minds, that we fear no moral prescriptions can effect a cure. Certainly no class of human beings are more inclined to postpone the serious performance of ordinary duties, to adapt themselves to those unattainable visions and glimpses of happiness, which they invariably set up as a contrast to their immediate discontent. There is only one argument to be used with such, to assure them that every situation will produce to them its attendant misery. The advice of Epictetus, an ancient philosopher, is particularly applicable to every one of these:"Abstain for a time from desire altogether, that in time thou mayst be able to desire rationally." -This, if not very easily practicable in its full extent, has very much of substantial wisdom in its admonitions. But, if desire be too closely linked with the primitive feelings of our nature to be easily suspended, let there be one strenuous attempt to exercise it upon those real blessings which are compatible with every station;

those blessings which are thus beautifully described by our great moralist, Dr. Johnson :

"Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resigned;
For love, which scarce collective man can fill;
For patience, sovereign o'er transmuted ill;
For faith, that panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind nature's signal of retreat;
These goods for man the laws of Heav'n ordain,
These goods He grants, who grants the pow'r to gain;
With these celestial wisdom calms the mind,
And makes the happiness she does not find."

STREET SIGHTS.

In a poem written in "verse burlesque " by Sir William D'Avenant, entitled 'The Long Vacation in London,' there is a very satisfactory enumeration of the principal sights which were presented to the admiring wayfarers of our city at the period when the Restoration had given back to the people some of their ancient amusements, and the councils of the primitive church were no longer raked up, as they were by old Prynne, to denounce bearleaders and puppet-showmen as the agents of the evil one,-excommunicated persons who were to be dealt with by the strong arm of the law, civil and ecclesiastical. The passage in D'Avenant's poem is as follows:

"Now vaulter good, and dancing lass

On rope, and man that cries Hey, pass!
And tumbler young that needs but stoop,
Lay head to heel to creep through hoop;
And man in chimney hid to dress,
Puppet that acts our old Queen Bess,
And man that whilst the puppets play,
Through nose expoundeth what they say;
And white oat-eater that does dwell
In stable small at sign of Bell,

:

That lift up hoof to show the pranks
Taught by magician, styled Banks;
And ape, led captive still in chain
Till he renounce the Pope and Spain:
All these on hoof now trudge from town
To cheat poor turnip-eating clown."

What a congregation of wonders is here! Hogarth could not have painted his glorious Southwark Fair' without actual observation; but here is an assemblage from which a companion picture might be made, offering us the varieties of costume and character which distinguish the age of Charles II. from that of George II. But such sights can only be grouped together now in London upon remarkable occasions. The London of our own day, including its gigantic suburbs, is not the place to find even in separate localities the vaulter, the dancing lass, the conjurer, the tumbler, the puppet-show, the raree-show, the learned horse, or the loyal ape.

Fleet Street, for example, is much too busy a place for the wonder-mongers to congregate in. A merchant in Ben Jonson's' Fox' says

""T were a rare motion to be seen in Fleet-street." A motion is another name for a puppet-show. His companion answers,

"Ay, in the Term.”

Fifty years afterwards D'Avenant tells us of his vagabonds, that in the Long Vacation

"All these on hoof now trudge from town

To cheat poor turnip-eating clown."

The sight-showers, we thus see, were in high activity in the Term, because Fleet Street was then full. When is it now empty? There is no room for their trades. They are elbowed out. We have seen, however, in some halfquiet thoroughfare of Lambeth, or of Clerkenwell, a dingy cloth spread upon the road, and a ring of children called together at the sound of horn, to behold a dancing lass in all the finery of calico trowsers and spangles, and a tumbler with his hoop: and on one occasion sixpence

was extracted from our pockets, because the said tumbler had his hoop splendid with ribbons, which showed him to have a reverence for the poetry and antiquity of his calling. He knew the line,

"And wear his colours like a tumbler's hoop."

But the tumbler himself was a poor performer. His merit was not called out. The street-passengers had as little to give to him as to the beggars, because they were too busy to be amused. If the Italian who exhibited before Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth could appear again in our metropolitan thoroughfares, we should pass on, regardless of his "turnings, tumblings, castings, hops, jumps, leaps, skips, springs, gambles, summersets, caperings, and flights; forward, backward, sideways, downward, and upward, with sundry windings, gyrings, and circumflexions." Joseph Clark, the great posturemaster, who figured about the period of the Revolution, would have had a much better chance with us. We require powerful stimulants; and he, as it is recorded in the Philosophical Transactions,' had "such an absolute command of all his muscles and joints, that he could disjoint almost his whole body."

D'Avenant has grouped his performers as they had been practically associated together for some centuries before his time. The joculator was not very inferior in dignity to the minstrel; but in time he became degraded into a juggler, and a hocus-pocus. The " man that cries Hey, pass!" was the great star of the exhibition, and the rope-dancer and tumbler and vaulter were his satellites. In a print to the "Orbis Pictus" of Comenius (1658) the juggler and his exhibition are represented with these various attractions. Nor was music wanting to the charm of these street performances. The beautiful air known by the name of Balance a Straw' was an especial favourite with the rope-dancers, and certainly its graceful movement would indicate that these performances had

*Love's Labour's Lost.

† Laneham's Letter from Kenilworth, 1575.

somewhat more of refinement in them than is commonly supposed to belong to such amusements for the people. The air is given in Mr. Chappell's collection; but we hope it may still be heard from the chimes of some country church, which have gone on for a century or two bestowing their melodies upon thankless ears: more probably, growing out of order, the chimes have been voted a nuisance by the vestry, and are consigned to oblivion, with many other touching remembrances of the past.

The conjurer's trade with us is losing its simplicity. This assertion may appear paradoxical. But the legitimate conjurer, the man of cups and balls,-is a true descendant of the personage, whether called joculator, or gleeman, or tregetour, who delighted our Saxon and Norman progenitors. He had no such dangerous tricks in his catalogue as that of being shot at with real powder and with real ball. He did not blind the spectators by their fears. He was a great artist, though, in his way; probably greater than the modern wizards. What are the thimble-riggers of our degenerate day compared with Chaucer's sleight-of-hand man ?—;

"There saw I eke Coll Tregetour
Upon a table of sycamore,

Playing an uncouth thing to tell;
I saw him carry a windmill

Under a walnut shell."

With tricks such as this did the Chinese jugglers astonish us some twenty years ago. The juggler is, indeed, of a corporation that has held the same fee-simple in the credulity of mankind during all ages and in all countries. In an interlude of the reign of Elizabeth we have these lines :

What juggling was there upon the boards!

What thrusting of knives through many a nose! What bearing of forms! what holdings of swords! What putting of bodkins through leg and hose!" Mr. Lane, in his interesting work, The Modern Egyptians,' tells us of the Kháwee, or conjuror of Cairo, that "in appearance, he forces an iron spike into the