soldiers, they fight almost as well as the Russians."* "Why," said I, with a lucky memory at the moment, "which of your regiments was it, that beat so gallantly the Russian Imperial Guards at Austerlitz?"— ""Twas my own," said the soldier with kindling enthusiasm ; "it was the chasseurs of the imperial guard that culbutaient, upset, the Russians at Austerlitz."" You yourself belonged to that regiment? then you must have been also in Portugal at the passage of the Esla?" The corporal answered " Oh, oui," with a most involuntary accent, it being there that Lord Paget overthrew and cut up the said chasseurs with notable slaugh"But we were out numbered," continued he, " as we always were when beaten-at Toulouse, for instance, were you not double our number?"-" Perhaps so, but you were beaten; at Talavera, you were double our number, yet were repulsed." The corporal was about to reply, when he was taken in flank by my dandy compatriot with a burst of French and English, but so mingled and so uncouthly pronounced, that neither of us knew what to make of it. It, however, interrupted an argument which might have gone farther than was agreeable.

ter.

Thus we jogged on through the wild and rocky tract beyond Fontainbleau, the beautiful town of Nemours, and Montargis, when night overtook us. Thence the next day, along the Loire to Nevers, where we were assailed by myriads of those manufacturers of bead purses, bead cords, and bead every thing, selling for sous what costs shillings in England. The Loire is broad and grand, but it possesses no beauty, -I was going to observe great rivers seldom do, but the Rhine occurred, and saved me from an assertion which France and Italy would allow. We had lost our bodkins, and here took in others, people of the country, who joined the corporal in relating feats of the French arms, and bearing testimony to each other's veracity mutually. Their vaunts, however, did not interfere with me, as here the Austrians were concerned, being encamped for a long time in 1814, they on one side of the Loire and Davoust on the other, in a state of truce nominally, but really in continual perils to the Germans from the hatred, sagacity, and courage of the French peasantry. Roanne was generally the scene of these short and sanguinary struggles. Here we passed a beautiful bridge of Napoleon's, not yet over the Loire, but at the side of it. I forgot to mention that we had passed through Moulins, nay through its very market-place, as mean and dirty a hole as ever was hallowed by sentiment. To look for Maria was in vain; the girls of the Bourbonnais are not pretty, and French girls know how to console themselves in better ways than Maria with her pipe. Neither Dandy, Breton, nor Corporal, had ever read the Sentimental Journey; so I was left to a long soliloquy on Sterne and sentiment,-" all that sort of thing and every thing in the world."-Mounting Tarare, and rolling down to Lyons, little conversation passed worth recording; we entered the second capital of France, and found it in a devil of an uproar-it was the funeral of the God Mercury, the Deity of Commerce, whose obsequies seven or eight hundred youths had followed; and they had finished by casting poor Commerce into the Rhone, to the great annoyance and occupation of the police.

*La sanglante journée de Talavera avait repandu l'effroi dans l'armée Française, et l'on convenait que les Anglais se battaient tout aussi bien que les Russes." French Account of the Peninsula War.

MR. BARRY CORNWALL'S NEW POEMS.*

We regret that this volume has not reached us sufficiently early in the course of our preparation for the present Number, to enable us either to enter into a critical discussion of its merits at such length as they deserve, or to give as many extracts as we could wish. But the name and reputation of the author are well known, and the following specimens of the Flood of Thessaly and the Girl of Provence will enable the reader at least to judge of the characteristic beauty of two of the principal poems. In the former of these, the phenomenon of a deluge is thus very powerfully delineated.

Higher and higher fled the wasted throngs,

And still they hoped for life, and still they died,
One after one, some worn, some hunger-mad:
Here lay a giant's limbs sodden and shrunk,
And there an infant's, white like wax, and close
A matron with grey hairs, all dumb and dead :-
Meanwhile, upon the loftiest summit safe,
Deucalion laboured through the dusky day,
Completing as he might his floating raft,
And Pyrrha, sheltered in a cave, bewailed
Her child which perished.-

Still the ruin fell:

No pity, no relapse, no hope :-The world
Was vanishing like a dream. Lightning and Storm,
Thunder and deluging rain now vexed the air
To madness, and the riotous winds laughed out

Like Bacchanals, whose cups some God has charmed.
Beneath the headlong torrents towns and towers
Fell down, temples all stone, and brazen shrines;
And piles of marble, palace and pyramid

(Kings' homes or towering graves) in a breath were swept
Crumbling away. Masses of ground and trees
Uptorn and floating, hollow rocks brute-crammed,
Vast herds, and bleating flocks, reptiles, and beasts
Bellowing, and vainly with the choaking waves
Struggling, were hurried out,-but none returned :
All on the altar of the giant Sea

Offered, like twice ten thousand hecatombs,
Whose blood allays the burning wrath of Gods.

Still fell the flooding rains. Still the Earth shrank :
And Ruin held his strait terrific way.

Fierce lightnings burnt the sky, and the loud thunder
(Beast of the fiery air) howled from his cloud,
Exulting, towards the storm-eclipsed moon.
Below, the Ocean rose boiling and black,
And flung its monstrous billows far and wide

Crumbling the mountain joints and summit hills;
Then its dark throat it bared and rocky tusks,

Where, with enormous waves on their broad backs,
The demons of the deep were raging loud;
And racked to hideous mirth or bitter scorn

Hissed the Sea-angels; and earth-buried broods

The Flood of Thessaly, The Girl of Provence, and other Poems, by Barry Cornwall, 8vo.

Of Giants in their chains tossed to and fro,
And the sea-lion and the whale were swung
Like atoms round and round.-

Mankind was dead :

And birds whose active wings once cut the air,
And beasts that spurned the waters,-all were dead :
And every reptile of the woods had died

Which crawled or stung, and every curling worm :—
The untamed tiger in his den, the mole

In his dark home-were choaked: the darting ounce,
And the blind adder and the stork fell down
Dead, and the stifled mammoth, a vast bulk,
Was washed far out amongst the populous foam :
And there the serpent, which few hours ago
Could crack the panther in his scaly arms,
Lay lifeless, like a weed, beside his prey.
And now, all o'er the deeps corpses were strewn,
Wide-floating millions, like the rubbish flung

Forth when a plague prevails; the rest down-sucked,
Sank, buried in the world-destroying seas.-

In the Girl of Provence, which terminates with a story pretty generally known and even alluded to in modern poetry, namely, that of a young French woman who fell in love with the statue of Apollo, and died of her hopeless passion, we have the following spirited description of the sculptured deity.

Life in each limb is seen, and on the brow

Absolute God;- no stone nor mockery shape
But the resistless Sun,-the rage and glow
Of Phoebus as he tried in vain to rape
Evergreen Daphne, or when his rays escape
Scorching the Libyan desert or gaunt side
Of Atlas, withering the great giant's pride.
And round his head and round his limbs have clung
Life and the flush of Heaven, and youth divine,
And in the breathed nostril backwards flung,
And in the terrors of his face, that shine.
Right through the marble, which will never pine
To paleness though a thousand years have fled,
But looks above all fate, and mocks the dead.
Yet stands he not as when blithely he guides
Tameless Eous from the golden shores

Of morning, nor when in calm strength he rides
Over the scorpion, while the lion roars
Seared by his burning chariot which out-pours
Floods of eternal light o'er hill and plain,
But, like a triumph, o'er the Python slain :
He stands with serene brow and lip upcurl'd
By scorn, such as Gods felt, when on the head
Of beast or monster or vain man they hurled
Thunder, and loosed the lightning from its bed,
Where it lies chained, by blood and torment fed;
His fine arm is outstretched, his arrow flown,
And the wrath flashes from his eyes of stone.

IRISH ARTISTS.

DURING a month I lately remained in the Metropolis of Ireland, my attention was occasionally directed, by our friend Sketch, to the state of the Fine Arts. One of our first morning lounges was to the shop of Mr. Allen, in Dame-street, whose name has been associated for the last twenty years perhaps, and in the minds of two generations, with drawing-paper, prints, chalks, black lead pencils, and Indian rubber, and a swarm of little et-ceteras known only to the cunning artist or emulative amateur. Here you will almost always find a picture or drawing sent to be framed, or, peradventure, to be sold. Mr. Allen can also talk knowingly to you about the merits of the Dublin painters, give you their addresses, or shake his head in praise or blame on their claims to notice. Indeed, he is himself a liberal patron of more than one in the lower classes; constantly purchasing portfolios of pencil-drawings, flower-wreaths and baskets, red-chalk drawings of arms, legs, noses, and ears, and, now and then, batches of legitimate water-colour landscapes. An artist who once held a respectable rank in his profession, now chiefly subsists on Mr. Allen's "encouragement” in the latter-mentioned branch. This is certainly a man of talent; I saw some of his early drawings, which, though slight, pleased me considerably; but it is melancholy to thumb over the heaps of things he now brings in, per week, to his " employer's" market. It is still more melancholy to observe him bring himself into the shop, with his little portfolio chucked under his arm. He happened to enter it while I was there. Rubbing his shoes on the mat with scrupulous anxiety, he advanced, radiant in smiles lit up by Mr. Allen's brief salutation, and then slowly and deferentially deposited his humble pack on the counter. "So, so ay, ay nearer the thing-better, much better than the last but, C- don't you think this foreground wants a wash of bistre? and those hills a grayer tint ?"-said the sagacious mercantile connoisseur, his nether lip protruded in the very easiness of in-felt power. I deemed myself getting angry at this scene, but a hearty laugh came to my relief, and I hurried out of the shop with Sketch, agreeing to seek elsewhere the character and respectability of Irish Art.

We turned towards the Dublin Society house, in Kildare-street, which at present may be called an epitome of our Royal Academy and British Museum: for here, along with stuffed fishes, open-mouthed lions, and cases of fossils and butterflies, and all the other curiosities of a Museum, you are prepared to meet casts of the antique, drawing-schools of four kinds, figure, landscape, modelling and architecture, and a lifeacademy for practising artists. Here, also, the students of the different schools annually exhibit drawings for premiums, and by the committee of Fine Arts of the Dublin Society their claims are judged and rewarded. You may ask how many eminent artists find place in this committee? I answer, No artist of any kind. Who compose it, then? Connoisseurs !

With malicious precision Sketch detailed to me, as he walked along, all the imposing professions and theoretic economy of this institution, and I approached its gates with no little awe and interest. The Society house is a princely structure, terminating a good street, across

which, at the top, it stands. It was lately purchased by the Society from the Duke of Leinster, whose family residence it had been, for a thundering sum, half in hand, and the other half to be paid-yet, I believe: the same building, by the way, which, when Ned Evans inquired in his Welsh brogue its name and purpose of a Dublin basket-boy, caused the characteristic reply of" O Js! where was hur born at all, at all?" or something like it, and afterwards much personal inconvenience to the mettlesome hero. It is faced by an entrance of three gates, and you walk across a noble court-yard to the edifice itself. A tinselled porter opened one of these gates for us, and another stood in the hall of the mansion to require our names in a visitingbook. We passed up magnificent staircases to the museums and library, which occupy excellent apartments. Before this we had visited the board-room, and found it fit for the reception of Majesty. I asked to see the gallery of casts. Sketch reconducted me first to the hall, and next introduced me to a little room off it; where, amid a few statues and the Elgin fragments, you have scarcely space to turn without breaking them or your nose. The rest are posted out of sight in the hall. I expressed my desire to turn upstairs again, to see the drawing-schools and life-academy. Sketch smiled bitterly, and led me out of the house across the court-yard. We reached the entrance gates, where I beheld a small red door in the side-wall of the yard, immediately opposite the porter's lodge, and this my friend shoved open and held for me to pass. We traversed, first, a narrow stable-lane, and then a stable-yard, grass grown and strewed with nuisance, and approached a row of mean brick buildings, which at a glance I recognized as, originally, the stables and dog-kennels of his Grace the Duke of Leinster. We gained them, and ascended by a dirty staircase to what had formerly been the hay-lofts of those stables; and after walking through narrow passages, floored with tiles, halted before a little low door, smeared with a dun raddle-colour, and upon which something was painted in large white letters. Sketch pointed and bade me read; and I deciphered words like the following. "The drawing-school to be opened such a day and hour-the landscape, such and such, &c-by order-John Wilson-house-keeper!" "This is the figure-school day and hour, so let us in" said Sketch. We pushed away and entered a place, the joists of the low and squalid roof of which slanted down to the ground. That ground was earthen, and burrowed into sundry holes. The light streamed in through oblong windows, patched, like harlequin, with a kind of glass called by "the trade" bulls-eyes, I believe. The walls were of a raddle colour to suit the door, and rugged and unfinished. School-desks and forms ran round, at and upon which sate some twenty or thirty shabby little boys, more than one of them bare-legged. In the middle of the loft was a stove, before which I descried a stool, and a little gentleman, to whom Sketch immediately introduced me as "Master of the figure academy." He bowed with an air, flourished his hand over his bald pate, as if to winnow together a few lank and desolate hairs, the last of their race, and shy, I thought, of being caught airing his shins at the stove; then smirked his way to a pedagogal desk, but as garden-snails carry their shells wherever they go-taking the precaution to bring his stool along with him. We talked-pshaw! we talked-" of Raphaels,