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With powers which might have made him a glorious repre sentative and minister of the beneficent Divinity, and with natural sensibilities which might have been exalted into su blime virtues, he chose to separate himself from his kindto forego their love, esteem, and gratitude that he might become their gaze, their fear, their wonder; and for this selfish, solitary good, parted with peace and imperishable

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A LITERARY DINNER.-Irving. -Mr Buckthorne called upon me, and took me with him 4o a regular literary dinner, given by a great bookseller, or rather a company of booksellers. I was surprised to find between twenty and thirty guests assembled, most of whom I had never seen before. Mr Buckthorne explained this to me, by informing me that this was a business-dinner, or kiud of field-day, which the house gave about twice a-year to its authors. It is true, they did occasionally give snug dinners to three or four literary men at a time; but then these were generally select authors, favourites of the public, such as had arrived at their sixth or seventh editions. "There are," said he, certain geographical boundaries in the land lof literature, and you may judge tolerably well of an author's popularity by the wine his bookseller gives him. An author crosses the port line about the third edition, and gets into claret; and when he has reached the sixth or seventh, he may revel in champagne and burgundy."

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ent And pray," said I, "how far may these gentlemen have reached that I see around me; are any of these clarét drinkers?" di botnew sH * Not exactly, not exactly. You find at these great diianers the common steady run of authors, one, two-edition men, or, if any others are invited, they are aware that it is a kind of republican meeting. You understand me a meeting of the republic of letters; and that they must expect -nothing but plain, substantial fare." doen has 1-bing

These hints enabled me to comprehend more fully the arrangement of the table. The two ends were occupied by two partners of the house, and the host seemed to have adopted Addison's idea as to the literary precedence of his

guests. A popular poet had the post of honour; opposite to whom was a hot-pressed traveller in quarto, with plates. A grave-looking antiquary, who had produced several solid works, that were much quoted and little read, was treated with great respect, and seated next to a neat dressy gentleman in black, who had written a thin, genteel, hot-pressed octavo on political economy, that was getting into fashion. Several three-volume-duodecimo men, of fair currency, were placed about the centre of the table; while the lower end was taken up with small poets, translators, and authors, who had not as yet risen into much notoriety.

The conversation during dinner was by fits and starts; breaking out here and there, in various parts of the table, in small flashes, and ending in smoke. The poet, who had the confidence of a man on good terms with the world, and independent of his bookseller, was very gay and brilliant, and said many clever things which set the partner next him in a roar, and delighted all the company. The other partner, however, maintained his sedateness, and kept carving on, with the air of a thorough man of business, intent upon the occupation of the moment. His gravity was explained to me by my friend Buckthorne. He informed me that the concerns of the house were admirably distributed among the partners. "Thus, for instance," said he, "the grave gentleman is the carving partner, who attends to the joints; and the other is the laughing partner, who attends to the jokes.” The general conversation was chiefly carried on at the upper end of the table, as the authors there seemed to possess the greatest courage of the tongue. As to the crew at the lower end, if they did not make much figure in talking, they did in eating. Never was there a more determined, inveterate, thoroughly-sustained attack on the trencher than by this phalanx of masticators. When the cloth was removed, and the wine began to circulate, they grew very merry and jocose among themselves. Their jokes, however, if by chance any of them reached the upper end of the table, seldom produced much effect. Even the laughing partner did not seem to think it necessary to honour them with a smile; which my neighbour Buckthorne accounted for, by informing me that there was a certain degree of popularity

to be obtained before a bookseller could afford to laugh at an author's jokes.

Amongst this crew of questionable gentlemen thus seated below the salt, my eye singled out one in particular. He was rather shabbily dressed; though he had evidently made the most of a rusty black coat, and wore his shirt-frill plaited and puffed out voluminously at the bosom. His face was dusky, but florid, perhaps a little too florid, particularly about the nose; though the rosy hue gave the greater lustre to a twinkling black eye. He had a little the look of a boon companion, with that dash of the poor devil in it which gives an inexpressibly mellow tone to a man's humour. I had seldom seen a face of richer promise; but never was a promise so ill kept. He said nothing, ate and drank with the keen appetite of a garreteer, and scarcely stopped to laugh, even at the good jokes from the upper end of the table. I inquired who he was. Buckthorne looked at him attentively" I have seen that face before," said he, "but where, I cannot recollect. He cannot be an author of any note. I suppose some writer of sermons, or grinder of foreign travels."

After dinner we retired to another room to take tea and coffee, where we were reinforced by a cloud of inferior guests-authors of small volumes in boards, and pamphlets stitched in blue paper. These had not as yet arrived to the importance of a dinner invitation, but were invited occasionally to pass the evening "in a friendly way." They were very respectful to the partners, and, indeed, seemed to stand a little in awe of them; but they paid devoted court to the lady of the house, and were extravagantly fond of the children. Some few, who did not feel confidence enough to make such advances, stood shyly off in corners, talking to one another; or turned over the portfolios of prints, which they had not seen above five thousand times, or mused over the music on the forte-piano.

The poet and the thin octavo gentleman were the persons most current and at their ease in the drawing-room, being men evidently of circulation in the west end. They got on each side of the lady of the house, and paid her a thousand compliments and civilities, at some of which I thought she

would have expired with delight. Every thing they said and did had the odour of fashionable life. I looked round in vain for the poor devil author in the rusty black coat; he had disappeared immediately after leaving the table, having a dread, no doubt, of the glaring light of a drawing-room. Finding nothing further to interest my attention, I took my departure soon after coffee had been served, leaving the poet, and the thin, genteel, hot-pressed, octavo gentleman, masters of the field.

THE STUDY OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY.-Herschel.

The situation of man on the globe he inhabits, and over which he has obtained the control, is, in many respects, exceedingly remarkable. Compared with its other denizens, he seems, if we regard only his physical constitution, in almost every respect their inferior, and equally unprovided for the supply of his natural wants and his defence against the innumerable enemies which surround him. No other animal passes so large a portion of its existence in a state of absolute helplessness, or falls in old age into such protracted and lamentable imbecility. To no other warmblooded animal has nature denied that indispensable covering, without which the vicissitudes of a temperate, and the rigours of a cold climate, are equally insupportable; and to scarcely any has she been so sparing in external weapons, whether for attack or defence. Destitute alike of speed to avoid, and of arms to repel the aggressions of his voracious foes; tenderly susceptible of atmospheric influences, and unfitted for the coarse aliments which the earth affords spontaneously, during at least two-thirds of the year, even in temperate climates-man, if abandoned to mere instinct, would be of all creatures the most destitute and miserable. Distracted by terror, and goaded by famine; driven to the most abject expedients for concealment from his enemies, and to the most cowardly devices for the seizure and destruction of his nobler prey, his existence would be one continued subterfuge or stratagem; his dwelling would be in dens of the earth, in clefts of rocks, or in the hollow of trees; his food worms, and the lower reptiles, or such few and crude productions of the soil, as his organs could be

brought to assimilate, varied with occasional relics, mangled by more powerful beasts of prey, or contemned by their more pampered choice. Remarkable only for the absence of those powers and qualities which obtain for other animals a degree of security and respect, he would be disregarded by some, and hunted down by others, till after a few generations his species would become altogether extinct, or, at best, would be restricted to a few islands in tropical regions, where the warmth of the climate, the paucity of enemies, and the abundance of vegetable food, might permit it to linger.

Yet man is the undisputed lord of the creation. The strongest and fiercest of his fellow-creatures-the whale, the elephant, the eagle, and the tiger—are slaughtered by him to supply his most capricious wants, or tamed to do him service, or imprisoned to make him sport. The spoils of all nature are in daily requisition for his most common uses, yielded with more or less readiness, or wrested with reluctance, from the mine, the forest, the ocean, and the air. Such are the first fruits of reason. Were they the only or the principal ones, were the mere acquisition of power over the materials, and the less gifted animals which surround us, and the consequent increase of our external comforts, and our means of preservation and sensual enjoyment, the sum of the privileges which the possession of this faculty conferred, we should, after all, have little to plume ourselves upon. But this is so far from being the case, that every one who passes his life in tolerable ease and comfort, or rather, whose whole time is not anxiously consumed in providing the absolute necessaries of existence, is conscious of wants and cravings in which the senses have no part, of a series of pains and pleasures totally distinct in kind from any which the infliction of bodily misery, or the gratification of bodily appetites, has ever afforded him; and if he has experienced these pleasures and these pains in any degree of intensity, he will readily admit them to hold a much higher rank, and to deserve much more attention, than the former class. Independent of the pleasures of fancy and imagination, and social converse, man is constituted a speculative being he contemplates the world, and the objects around

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