SONNET. (From Lupercio de Argensola.) Yo os quiero confesar, Don Juan, primero," &c. I grant, Don John, the lily and rose that, rarely A beauty charms us in the lovely lie, That so much Beauty should be so much Lying! Note. The joke of the first four lines is the common property of satirists in many languages. Martial has it in his "Nam quod emas possis dicere jure tuum" (ii. 20), and in his later Epigram : "Jurat capillos esse quos emit suos Fabulla Numquid illa, Paulle, pejerat?"—(vi. 12.) Mr. Booth in his badly edited Book of Epigrams, Ancient and Modern,' gives an English reading of it : "The lovely hair that Mary wears Is hers, who would have thought it? But the turn given to it in the sequel is, so far at least as I know, the VI. THE LOVER'S DOOM. (From Don Diego de Mendoza.) "Esta es la justicia Que mandan hacer," &c. This is the sentence That Justice must pass Gets caught like an ass. Poor wretch, if once beauty In the maze of Don Cupid In vain he his prison Will strive to repass, Whoever in Love's trap Gets caught, like an ass. Let him pen odes and sonnets, And when life grows a burden E'en Death to his summons Will turn a deaf ear. So hard is the sentence In passionate blindness A cheat for a truth, And but kindles a furnace Through which he must pass,— Whoever in Love's trap Gets caught, like an ass. The stings of a woman's That mock at his pain,- If he e'er find a moment His suit to declare, Let her smile on some rival Let no man believe in For his case, who in Love's trap Note. "Some of Mendoza's lyrics," says 66 Bouterwek, are overloaded with tedious love-complainings." Perhaps the above may partly justify the criticism. To me, I confess, it seems written more from the head than from the heart. VII. SONNET. (From Quevedo.) "Buscas en Roma à Roma, o peregrino! Y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas," &c. Pilgrim, in Rome who seekest Rome, resign The search, in Rome's self Rome is lost and gone :- In its own wreck self-tombed is Aventine; The Imperial Palace strews its namesake-hill; The medalled bronze, whereon her gravers traced That erst a Queenly City girt, to-day With mournful murmur round a grave complains. Note.-Perhaps I ought hardly to include this among specimens of "lighter" Spanish poetry. But I hope I may be forgiven for striking my last chord in a graver tone. The sonnet has been long, widely, and justly admired: and Spaniards, I think, claim for it such a place in their literature as the famous sonnet of Filicaja ("Italia! Italia!" &c.) holds in that of the Italians. HINTS FOR AN AUTUMNAL RAMBLE. BY AN OLD TRAMP. Ir is not one of the calamities that occasion lamentation and mourning and woe, for the hard-worked man of affairs to lose from untoward accident these few weeks of July or August that were to throw sunshine on his heart, and clearing it of the mist and damp, of the contest with the world, send him back a resuscitated man, with a zest for the duties that towards the holiday period were daily increasing in burdensome weight. Though his calamity be not sufficiently acute to draw sympathetic tears from the witnesses of his woes, yet it may be esteemed as a worthy and humane act to endeavour to mitigate his disappointment by taking his misfortune into consideration, and looking around for the discovery of any available mitigation of his lot. Let the merit of the service achieve no higher eminence in well-doing than that earned by the stranger on the road who is enabled to set the wayfaring man on the right path to his destination; or, if he has gone hopelessly astray, to help him to some possible place of refuge for the night. A few hints have already been dropped on the availability of the tourist districts nearest home. There is no intention of saying more about the Isle of Wight, or Portland, or Wales, or the Lake district-even of the Grampians. It may be that the available resources of all these pleasure-grounds have been already exhausted by him whose misfortune it has been to lose his chances of a more distant and heretofore untrodden pilgrimage. For the few days yet available, he would fain, if it be practicable, indulge in the genial prospect of "to-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." The period of the year has come when we must look northward for sunshine, and, so doing, the following pages are devoted to the separate archipelagos or groups of islands known as Orkney and Shetland. To Thomas Carlyle's solemn mystery of the midnight hour," when all the world is asleep except the watchers," we may find a companion mystery in the equinoxes, when at the same points of time the sun rises and sets "from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand." When September has set in there are still some twenty days giving Shetland more sunshine than any other region of the British empire. An Unfortunately the suggested field of enterprise, though near at hand, is not endowed with the further advantage that it can be reached without going to sea; nor is there any immediate prospect, for all the triumphant progress of our engineers in tunnelling and bridging, that the difficulty will be remedied for the present generation. amusing and instructive book was written by an amiable and accomplished author,-not yet, let it be hoped, forgotten among us,-James Baillie Fraser, called Narrative of the Residence of the Persian Princes in London in 1835 and 1836, with an Account of their Journey from Persia, and subsequent Adventures.' Baillie Fraser was one of the most eminent among British orientalists, and his other works deal exclusively with Eastern life and history. Here, however, he brings the Eastern life into picturesque conjunc tion and contrast with our civilisation, our common-sense, and our vulgarity; and while other authors pursuing the same object — as Morier, in his amusing story of 'Hajji Baba'. - have had to invent their little histories, he had the privilege of taking his picture from life. Among the countless difficulties through which it was impossible to assimilate the oriental with the Teutonic notions, was the impossibility of bringing the Persian ambassadors to London overland, and the impossibility of proving to them that the feat was impossible. The French Government had brought them to Paris comfortably over smooth roads why did not Britain do the same? and all arguments founded on the insular nature of our territory were received with the plea-no doubt there might be difficulties, but the great point was that France had kindly overcome them, and Britain had not. · In Hood's Up the Rhine' we have a short scene between a florid Englishman, suffering the martyrdom of the Channel in its cruellest form, and a yellow Yankey, who takes the whole affair with indifference and comfort. As a result of a conversation between the two, a bargain is struck that for a consideration the stranger, who admits that he was not always exempt from the other's fate, shall reveal the secret of his method of exempting himself. The sale of it being distinctly and satisfactorily adjusted, the secret is announced as "being thirty years at sea." Cheerless as it may seem, this points to the true remedy for the If any inexperienced youth, ambitious of becoming a bold wanderer, desires to struggle with and master the difficulties of his fate at the beginning, let him take to the sea with resignation and courage. What may perhaps at first have been repulsive and even painful, will gradually assimilate his nature to its moods, and he will find that he has created a world for enjoyment in after-life. There is somewhere a story of a venerable voluptuary expressing his envy of the hearty appreciation of plain food by an unsophisticated youth, saying to him, "Ah, young man, when you come to my time of life, you will see the egregious folly of wasting so brilliant an appetite on cold mutton." But the moral here expressed is inverted by him who endures and conquers the affliction of the first trials of sea life. has opened to himself a vast world of enjoyment, immeasurably more precious than many of those that, arising out of pampered appetites, steadily wear themselves out in their own service. He "If Shetland is to be opened up to visitors, and to be brought within reasonable reach of tourists, it will be necessary to revise the transit arrangements with a special view to their convenience. Another serious drawback is, that there is no pier at require to be landed in small boats; Lerwick; passengers as well as cargo and when the arrival takes place at ten or eleven o'clock at night, or at three in the morning, and when the night or the morning is dark and rainy, the experience is not the most pleasant in the world." If the correspondent remembered the little incident of the landing, he should have remembered it only as exhilarating variation on the luxurious monotony |