fox," and her pathetic lamentation to her husband that she "dearly loved the riding, but she would rather never see the finish." However, as De Vigne said the morning before, chacun à son gôut; if we all liked the same style of woman where should we be? We rival and jostle and hate each other enough as it is about that centre of all mischief, the beau sexe, Heaven knows!

We had another run that day, but it was a very slow affair. We killed the fox, but he made scarcely any running at all, and we might have scored it almost as a blank day but for our first glorious twenty minutes, one of the fastest things I ever knew, from Euston Hollows to Sifton Wood. Lady Blanche went back in ill-humour: missing that ditch had put the pretty widow in dudgeon for all day; but Flora L'Estrange and her little mare, which merited its name Petite, kept with us all the time, and Constance Trefusis-Well, it's my firm conviction that Mazeppa's gallop would not have tired that woman, and she rode, as De Vigne observed admiringly to me, with as firm a seat and as strong a hand as any rough-rider's. Excellence in his own art pleased him, I suppose, for he watched her more and more, and rode back to Euston Hollows with her through the gloaming, some nine miles from where the last fox was killed, looking down on her haughty beauty with bold, tender glances.

THE OLD AND NEW YEAR.

BY NICHOLAS MICHELL.

TIME full of myst'ry glides; we mark its flow
By the small dials on our earth,

Or the grand worlds we gaze on from below,
Ne'er pausing since their birth:

They are the bright hands of the watch of glory,
Its face the azure boundless sky,

And it can never err, though old and hoary,
For God hath placed its works on high.

The hours upon that mighty disc of time
Our ages are, the seconds years,

The mystic beatings, like a voice sublime,
Sounding in fancy's ears:

Th' eternal hand hath moved a second now;
Man's little year is done;

Unchanged seems grand Orion's fiery brow,
But we have flitted round our sun.

Our year, in time's tremendous onward march,
A little thing in truth may be,

But 'tis to us a stone in that great arch-
Our soul's eternity.

O perished Year! though dead, not dead to mind,
Memory beholds and grasps thee still;

We see the tracks thy footsteps leave behind-
Record of good and ill.

We hear the cry from Syria's cedar'd mountains,
Where Fury stalked by Murder's side,

And blood flowed staining ancient streams and fountains,
And woman shrieked and died.

We see a people, groaning weary years
Beneath oppression's blinding reign,
Casting unto the winds their palsying fears,
Breaking their close-forged chain.

The valiant dead of glorious ages gone
Might rise exultant from their graves,
And cheer the rushing bands of freedom on,
No longer slaves.

Italia's victory-shout hath rent the sky,

And thrilled the wide world's mighty heart; O Year! this work is thine-in glory die! Heroic Year! depart!

heroes, sages,

Go, join the infinite of buried ages!
With thee how many spirits sleep,
Cut down in thy brief span-saints,
Whom worth and genius weep!
The lovely, too, with eyes of light now dim,
With cheeks of bloom now cold,

Are gone to join the choiring seraphim,
E'en lovelier than of old.

Farewell! thou hast our blessing, year departed;
Thou hast our smiles, our sighs;

We mourn above thy tomb, not broken-hearted,
But upward cast our eyes:

A phoenix-spirit from thine ashes springs,
Strong, and yet tremulous with fear;

It spreads hope's buoyant and exulting wings-
Hail! hail! thou new-born Year!

Young stranger, o'er thee hang no cloud of sadness,

Beam on the world in light!

Scatter the flowers of love, and peace, and gladness,

Give us prosperity, delight!

Oh! give us good without the marring ill,

No cause to shed a tear;

Trample on wrong, make right triumphant still

Hail! hail! thou new-born Year!

NOTES ON NOTE-WORTHIES,

OF DIVERS ORDERS, EITHER SEX, AND EVERY AGE.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

And make them men of note (do you note, men?).—Love's Labour's Lost, Act III. Sc. 1.

D. Pedro. Or, if thou wilt hold longer argument,

Balth.

Do it in notes.

Note this before my notes,

There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting. D. Pedro. Why these are very crotchets that he speaks, Notes, notes, forsooth, and noting!

Much Ado About Nothing, Act II. Sc. 3.

And these to Notes are frittered quite away.-Dunciad, Book I.

Notes of exception, notes of admiration,

Notes of assent, notes of interrogation.-Amen Corner, c. iii.

XXXV.-BUBB DODINGTON.

THE identification of Mr. Rigby, in " Coningsby," with a late Secretary to the Admiralty, was considered, by the knowing ones in such matters, to be undeniable and complete. Be that as it may, the identification need not be exhaustive in one particular instance. There is in it ample room and verge enough for antitypes more than one. The eighteenth century, for example, had its Treasurer to the Admiralty, who might, in a plurality of traits, have made well-nigh as good an original for the Rigby portrait, as, by popular assumption, a Secretary of the nineteenth did. Bubb Dodington may surely divide honours, in this respect, with Wilson Croker.

Mr. Disraeli's highly-coloured picture is that of a man whose origin, education, early pursuits and studies, have been equally obscure, but who has contrived in good time to squeeze himself into parliament, and there set up to be a perfect man of business; whom the world takes at his

The name reminds us of an allusion to it in connexion with Bubb Dodington himself, by an Edinburgh Reviewer of credit and renown. Speaking of the time -for a time there was-when people there were who called William Pitt a pretender and Bubb Dodington a statesman, the reviewer observes: "To 'recover monarchy from the inveterate usurpation of oligarchy,' was, according to the latter eminent person's announcement to his patron, the drift of the Bute system. The wisdom of a Younger Party in more modern days, which (copying some peevish phrases of poor Charles I.) compares the checks of our English constitution to Venetian Doges and Councils of Ten, had its rise in the grave sagacity of Bubb Dodington. The method of the proposed recovery' was also notable and has equally furnished precedents to later times. It was simply to remove from power every man of political distinction, and replace him with a convenient creature."Edinburgh Review, January, 1845.

At the date of the article here quoted, the Young England party was prominent in the eyes, and "Coningsby" in the mouths, of men.

The article itself has since been reprinted, in the collected edition of Mr. John Forster's Essays.

word, for he is bold, acute, and voluble; with no thought, but a good deal of desultory information; and though destitute of all imagination and noble sentiment, yet blessed with a vigorous mendacious fancy, fruitful in small expedients, and never happier than when devising shifts for great men's scrapes. He has a clear head, indefatigable industry, an audacious tongue, a ready and unscrupulous pen, a power of lampoons and private memoirs and political intrigues. He has the credit of being an adept in machinations, and is supposed ever to be involved in profound and complicated contrivances. "This was quite a mistake. There was nothing profound about Mr. Rigby; and his intellect was totally incapable of devising or sustaining an intricate or continuous scheme. He was, in short, a man who neither thought nor felt; but who possessed, in a very remarkable degree, a restless instinct for adroit baseness."* not all of this, yet too much of it for his good fame, is unhappily applicable to Lord Melcombe-little though one might suppose it, from Thomson's apostrophe to him as a being

In whom the human graces all unite;

Pure light of mind, and tenderness of heart;
Genius and wisdom; the gay social sense,
By decency chastised; goodness and wit,
In seldom-meeting harmony combined;
Unblemished honour, and an active zeal
For Britain's glory, liberty, and man :
O Dodington!†

If

You

O Dodington! indeed. And, O Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson O! You panegyrised him in prose, James, as well as in verse-in florid, flatulent, dedication, as well as by poetical licence in artful metre. pronounced him, to his face (while professing to scorn the "common tract of dedicators"), a character in which the Virtues, the Graces, and the Muses joined their influence; and you asked, as even the commonest of dedicators might, what reader need be told of those great abilities in the management of public affairs, and those amiable accomplishments in private life, which he, the Rt. Hon. Mr. Dodington, then one of the Lords of His Majesty's Treasury, so eminently possessed. "The general voice is loud in the praise of so many virtues, though posterity alone will do them justice. But may you, sir, live long to illustrate your own fame by your own actions, and by them be transmitted to future times as the British Mæcenas!" The British Virgil has done his bucolical best; but somehow it is not as the British Maecenas that posterity is apt to think and speak of Bubb Dodington.

Give him his literary dues, however. "He was a wit, an orator, and a poet," says Mr. Robert Bell.§ Leigh Hunt, one of the least likely of men to be prepossessed towards a Dodington, as candidly as indulgently affirms, that "even that caricature of an intriguing and servile statesman, Bubb Dodington, had a poetical vein of tender and serious grace."|| He is the alleged original of Cibber's portrait of a Gentleman, unnamed"the first man, of so sociable a spirit, that I ever knew capable of quitting the allurements of wit and pleasure, for a strong application to business"

Coningsby, bk. i. ch. ii.; bk. ii. ch. i.
Dedication of "Summer."

†The Seasons: Summer. § Annotations on Thomson.

On Deceased Statesmen who have written Verses.

"whose bare interjections of laughter have humour in them." Lady Mary quotes his last pleasantry, real or reputed-as where she apprises her sister, the Countess of Mar, of a bill that is being cooked-up at Houghton (Sir Robert Walpole's), to have not taken out of the Commandments and clapped into the Creed-and reports that Dodington very gravely objected, that the obstinacy of human nature was such, that he feared when they had positive commands to do so, perhaps people would not commit adultery and bear false witness against their neighbours with the readiness and cheerfulness they do at present.† The "most accomplished Mr. Dodington," her ladyship elsewhere styles him:-" Mrs. Murray has got a new lover in the most accomplished Mr. Dodingtonso much for the progress of love."‡ This George Bubb that had been -Mr. Dodington that was-Baron Melcombe that should be, was a man of mark for fine-lady letter-writers.

He set up, too, not unsuccessfully, for the fine gentleman. Obstacles there were, physical and social, which it was his proud endeavours to confront, and partially his good fortune to overcome. At him was directed Fielding's rhyming epistle, "True Greatness;" and by Fielding's latest biographer he is described not only as a restless political intrigueractive, clever, and witty-but as also a fop of the first water, who managed to bring upon himself continual ridicule. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, as Mr. Lawrence§ reminds us, lampooned him in a ballad, once immensely popular, called "A Grub upon Bubb," and Lord Chesterfield irreverently says of him, "With submission to my Lord Rochester, God made Dodington the coxcomb he is-mere human means could never bring it about." Elsewhere we read how elaborately Bubb decorated his large person with brocade and embroidery; cultivated the exploded fashions of an enormous tie-periwig and deep lace ruffles, which, says Cumberland, gave him the appearance of "an ancient courtier in a gala dress;" slept in a bed garnished with feather hangings, in imitation of Mrs. Montague; and observed a royal magnificence in the style of his interiors, and in his stately mode of receiving visitors. Churchill's Ghostly visions include a glimpse of

-Melcombe's feathered head-
Who, quite a man of gingerbread,
Savoured in talk, in dress, and phiz,
More of another world than this,
To a dwarf Muse a giant page,
The last grave fop of the last age. T

He is the Bubo of Pope. Even after his death, he was satirised by
Foote in the character of Sir Thomas Lofty. Mr. Thackeray, in one of
his Georgian lectures, has popularised him in a ridiculous attitude.
"Misfortunes would occur in these interesting genuflectory ceromonies
of royal worship. Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, a very fat, puffy
man, in a most gorgeous court-suit, had to kneel, Cumberland says, and
was so fat and so tight that he could not get up again."
."** Nor does the
malicious lecturer help him to his feet again, but leaves him as he found
him, without spending another word on that fat fop in a fix.

An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, ch. i. † Letters of Lady M. Wortley Montague (Oct. 31, 1723). Life of Henry Fielding, ch. xii.

Churchill, The Ghost, book iv.

Ibid., 1725. || Robert Bell.

** The Four Georges, No. iii.