imperfect to the gods; and because in the exuberant opulence of his art, Phidias could afford to be extravagant, and throw away a masterpiece upon a blind wall.-Judge hence of the superior majesty, of the more celestial grace and sublimity by which the central figures were made glorious to the eyes; but judge not, even from them, of the pinnacle to which Phidias could exalt his art. All these were fashioned for exposure to the injuries of the weather, and from the great height at which they were to be viewed, were meant to excite admiration by the grandeur of general effect, rather than the exquisiteness of minute detail. Imagine the awful beauty of the statues within the temple, where both were to be combined !-Conceive the stupendous symmetry of the Minerva, thirty-nine feet high-the still more majestic proportions of the Olympian Jupiter, executed for the Eleans!" How long this enumeration might have continued, it is impossible to say, but it was rudely broken, and the whole fabric of my reverie demolished by the voice of the museum porter." Sir, you're the only gemman left, and we always locks the doors at six."-Once more I surveyed the marble upon which the living eyes of all the illustrious persons I have mentioned had been formerly fixed-as well as those of Cicero, Pliny, Pausanias, and Plutarch, who have recorded their visits to the Parthenon; and then, with slow steps, I quitted the building. On reaching the street, I still doubted whether I was in the Acropolis, the Agora, or before the theatre of Bacchus-when a lamplighter, scampering by me, skipped up his ladder, and, by the light of his link, I discovered, printed on a black board-" GREAT rus◄ SELL-STREET, BLOOMSBURY!" H. DEATH-POSTHUMOUS MEMORIALS CHILDREN. How I could expatiate upon the quaint lugubrious pleasantry, the social yet deep philosophy of your friend ELIA, as particularly illustrated in his delightful paper upon New Year's Eve!-but the bandying of praises among Correspondents has too Magazinish a look :--I have learnt his essay by heart. Is it possible, said I to myself, when I first devoured it, that such a man can really feel such horrors at the thought of death, which he describes with so much humorous solemnity? But when I came to his conclusion, wherein he talks of the fears, "just now expressed, or affected," I had presently a clue to his design. Ha! I exclaimed, thou art the very Janus who hast always delighted in antithetical presentments; who lovest to exhibit thy tragic face in its most doleful gloom, that thou mayst incontinently turn upon us the sunshine of thy comic smile.-Thou wouldst not paint the miseries endured by a friendless boy at Christ's, without a companion piece, portraying the enjoyments of a more fortunate youngster. Thou wouldst not pour forth the phials of thy wrath upon the plant tobacco, without the redemption of an eulogy upon its virtues, more eloquent than Sir Walter Raleigh's: nor hast thou now, as I trust, pronounced thy anathema against the "foul ugly phantom," without being prepared, in the same happy strain, to chant a palinode. No, no. Death hath not any such grisly concomitants, considered either as a "thin, melancholy privation, or more confounding positive." He is the sleeping partner of life, and we give ourselves up to him every night, without any compunctious visitings:-we know not, when we enter them, that the sheets of our bed shall not prove our winding sheets, yet our hearts quake not. We walk arm in arm with him almost every hour, and when his gentle hand draws the curtain around us, and covers us up in our narrow bed, what is it but to fall asleep, and to have a little longer to wait for the day-light.-As I return to my sequestered quiet cottage, after the bustle of a day in London, and a glimpse at the pageantry of the theatre; so after the great drama of life, shall we return to the tranquil non-existence from which we started: -we have had our turn, and must Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; Shakspeare, with his usual insight into human nature, has put the cowardly speech, of which this is the commencement, with all its monstrous notions of the Deity, and its abject and grovelling conclusion, into the mouth of Clodio, a dastard, who would purchase a pittance of life with his sister's dishonour-Well might she exclaim— O you beast! O faithless coward! O'dishonest wretch! Yet there is some force in the ear nestness with which he urges the uncertain nature of death. "We know what we are, but we know not what we may be."-And yet, after all, it is the love of what we are going from, more than the fear of what we are going to, that makes us draw back our foot when the grave opens beneath it. Three-fourths of mankind, in their last moments, seem more anxious to be recorded in this world than favoured in the next; and many masses ostensibly ordered for the repose of the soul, have really proceeded from a desire for perpetuating some remembrance of the body. No one likes to drop into the earth, like a pebble into the ocean, and let the waves of eternity close over him, without some record or memorial. We wish to keep up some connection with mortality, however slight; and we stretch back our shadowy arms from the tomb, to snatch at a phantom. Hence all our posthumous vanity, and monumental earth-clinging, from the dateless pyramids, down to the recent will of Mrs. Mary Hoggins of St. Olave, Southwark, who bequeaths to the parish ringers "a leg of mutton and trimmings, FOR EVER, for ringing a peal of triple-bobmajors on the anniversary of her birth." In commemorating its donor, the leg of mutton cannot fail more egregiously than the pyramids, which have entombed the names, as well as the bodies of their builders:--" they've been 80 long remembered they're forgot ;"-or, if Cheops and Ceph renes be indeed their founders, what have they perpetuated? An empty word, a sound, which we cannot in corporate in flesh and blood; no, nor even in bones and dust, for Cambyses and Belzoni were both forestalled. -The monarch's sarcophagus was found empty, while the bones of the sacred bull were still whole and recognizable. What a satire on human ambition!-Of the Mausoleum, one of the seven wonders of the world, not an atom remains we know no thing of him, who for so many centuries was its solitary tenant, while the name of the Queen who built it is familiar in our mouths, and will travel securely down to futurity from her having imparted it to a humble flower. What a triumph for nature !-I always keep some of these historical plants by me:-their hoar leaves tell a more affecting tale, than that inscribed by Apollo on the petals of the hyacinth. Ingenuity has been exhausted in varying contrivances to defraud oblivion. Doggett has clothed his memory in a waterman's coat and badge; while another actor serves up the embalmed mummy of his name in a twelfth cake, to be annually devoured in the green-room. But the substance is soon lost in the shadow, the symbol recalls no recollection of the original; nothing remains but the name of a nonentity; and what is this worth?-Bucephalus perpetuated his name, as well, as Alexander; the in cendiary of Diana's temple eternised his, though it was forbidden to be uttered, while that of its first builder is lost. Vice, indeed, and folly have better chances of immortality, than virtue and wisdom; for the former only are registered in our Courts and Calends; and as blood and misery are the materials with which history builds, one destroyer of mankind shall outlast fifty benefactors. The Chinese have no annals, for they have had no wars. Poor-spirited wretch that I am!-no circumstances could have made me a hero, for, with shame I confess it, I would rather be a forgotten philosopher, than a remem¬ bered tyrant. Poets have a much more substan→ tial existence after death. The "non omnis moriar," is not altogether a vain boast: their minds ac tually survive; we are conversant ness, as well as a plea for pleasure, When old Chinnery, of Fenchurchstreet, had realized a hundred thousand pounds, he was advised to retire from business, that he might en joy himself and be miserable. "I must take care of my children," was his reply; so he continued to do the only thing for which he was fitted, and, after many more laborious and prosperous seasons, died covered with years and plums. At Vauxhall, last summer, I met my grave and substantial neighbour, Frampton, who, with an air of some confusion at being detected in an enjoyment, assured me he had not been there before for many years, and only came then to give his children a treat. Mine, I am sure, give me a treat when they enable me to shake my sides at Grimaldi's jokes, and laugh the wrinkles out of my heart. Cares come with them too, it must be admitted; but it is better to have something to fear than nothing to hope. A father has no tædium vita; and he loves his children the better, when he considers them as the depositaries and concentrations of past anxieties. They exhilarate his life, smooth his pillow of death, and give even a domestic attraction to the grave, wherein he joins those that have gone before him, and waits for those that are to follow. In fact, he hardly dies; the living transcripts of his face and figure are still moving upon the earth; his name survives, embodied in another self; his blood is still flowing through human veins, and may continue its crimson current till the great wheel shall stand still. What posthumous memorial so vital as this? But children are often wayward and mischievous, and it is not less painful than necessary to correct them. I cannot deny it; for unfortunately the proof is now before me; and as Elia has given us a glimpse of a bachelor's study, with its huge folios, I will present to him a little scene from a parent's parlour.-There stands my daughter Rosalind in disgrace! Relying upon the almost intuitive quickness of her mind, she has contented herself with casting one hasty glance upon her lesson, and, in school language, has been turned back, not without a smart reprimand for her idleness and precipitation. She listens in tingling silence; and as she hangs down her head, her looks, falling forward, enable me to discover every articulation of the blue veins in her fair temple. A deep blush suffuses her face, while, with a mixed emotion of shame, and of a proud consciousness that she does not deserve the epithet "dunce,' which has been applied to her, she is pressing her lips together to prevent her crying. But it is in vain ; beneath the long lashes of her downeast eyes the tears are oozing outthey roll slowly over her crimsoned cheek, and fall upon the neglected book, one of whose leaves she is perseveringly twiddling with her finger and thumb. In a farther corner of the room, upon the stool of repentance, sits my noble, warm-hearted boy, Alfred, whose interdicted ball has for the second time broken me a large pane of glass; for which I have not only vilipended him with angry looks and scolding voice, but have forbidden the intended visit to-morrow to his uncle. He is sobbing aloud; and through the tears, which, refusing to be mopped up by the backs of both his hands, have made a wet patch in his pinafore, he steals at me now and then an inquiring glance; but, on observing the severity of my countenance, instantly recalls his eyes. His is not the artifice of a cunning or cowardly child, exaggerating its distress to excite compassion; nor the hateful anger of a revengeful one; nor the passion of an irascible one; but it is the boiling over of an affectionate heart, ready to break, because it is no longer in communion with mine, and because he cannot give vent to his love tomorrow, by pouting up his lips to kiss his cousins. All this presents a painful picture to a father. But is it nothing to anticipate the hour of reconciliation, when, with sparkling eyes, my children shall leap to my bosom? Is it nothing to know from experience that the tide of affection will gush more abundantly from this temporary interruption, and that I shall again be able to exclaim with old Dornton in the play-"who would not be a father?"-Is it nothing that but I have described this happy moment till I can wait for its arrival no longer. God bless ye, my darlings; come to my arms at once! While I have been wiping my children's eyes and my own, one of those involuntary thoughts which shoot across the brain like meteors, led me to ask what might be the future fate and fortune of those whom I was embracing. Affecting speculation!-Is it possible that these vivacious beings, bounding about in an intoxication of delight from the mere luxury of existence, can be come old, and querulous, and paralytic, and crawl along upon crutches? -Stale morality, to rake in the grave for dusty mementos of our evanescency: to hold up a dead man's scull before our eyes, as if we drank our wine out of it, and wished to hob-anob, or beat the devil's tattoo upon our memories with a skeleton's drumsticks! If we wish to stamp this moral upon our hearts, let us compare man with himself; let us contemplate the death of the living; of those who have survived themselves, and become their own tombs. Never did I feel so acutely the vanity of life, as when, in a palsied and su peramuated old woman, I was told I beheld the celebrated beauty, upon whom Lord Chesterfield had written the well known song Fair Kitty, beautiful and young, But there is one pang, and an agonizing one it is, from which bachelors are happily exempt. Heaven sometimes reclaims the most beautiful of our angels for itself. When our children have just fastened themselves to our hearts by a thousand ties, death, then, indeed, " a foul ugly phantom," will stretch forth his bony hand to wrench them from us, and almost tear up our hearts by the roots in the struggle! This excruciating disruption I have lately undergone, and I still shudder when I think of it. Farewell, my poor little--I knew I could not pronounce her name; but I find I cannot even write it; and (yet such is the different construction of minds! her mother, whose distress was much more pungent than my own, found a solace in cherishing and nursing her memory, and could even bear to arrange her sorrows in verse. I enclose you the lines: it is needless to say, that they were never meant for publication, and affect no merit beyond the simple expression of the feelings they were intended to alleviate. And now, Mr. Editor, I feel, that for all this nursery nonsense, some apology is due to your bachelor readers, always, however, excepting Elia, whose heart, whatever may be his real state, is assuredly cordial and parental. Assume an object, if you have it not. Let your Benedictine perusers, therefore, and all the Herods of the LONDON MAGAZINE, laud me for my moderation and bre vity, when they learn that I have been merely writing to illustrate this position Paternity is as garrulous as old age. God help me! I shall soon have both pleas to offer; and yet, "I bate no jot of heart or hope." I have run three fourths of my race without any diminution of happiness, and I will not anticipate it for the future; nothing shall destroy my confidence in the benignant provisions of nature. To yourself, Sir, I offer no extenuation of my prolixity: your own heart will justify the overflowings of mine; for you are, I believe, like myself, A FATHER. LINES ON THE DEATH OF AN INFANT. "Tis hard, dear babe, to think that for ever we must part, That thou again wilt never be press'd unto my heart, For tho' thou wert but young, thou wert made to us most dear, How often with thy father have I sat beside thy bed, |