been taking a nap of two or three thousand years in the catacombs of Luxor? M. Denon maintains that almost all the learning, and nearly all the arts of modern Europe, were known to the ancient Egyptians; and as a partial confirmation of this theory I may here mention, that on the interior case of a mummy chest there was lately found a plate of crystallised metal resembling tin, although that art has only been recently and accidentally discovered in England. So true is it that there is nothing new which has not once been old. What laborious days, what watchings by the midnight lamp, what rackings of the brain, what hopes and fears, what long lives of laborious study, are here sublimized into print, and condensed into the narrow compass of these surrounding shelves! What an epitome of the past world, and how capricious the fate by which some of them have been preserved while others of greater value have perished! The monks of the middle ages being the great medium of conservation, and outraged nature inciting them to avenge the mortification of the body by the pruriousness of the mind, the amatory poets have not only come down to us tolerably entire, but they "have added fat pollutions of their own," passing off their lascivious elegies as the production of Cornelius Gallus, or anonymously sending forth into the world still more licentious and gross erotics. Some of the richest treasures of antiquity have been redeemed from the dust and cobwebs of monastical libraries, lumber-rooms, sacristies, and cellars; others have been excavated in iron chests, or disinterred from beneath ponderous tomes of controversial divinity, or copied from the backs of homilies and sermons, with which, in the scarcity of parchment, they had been overwritten. If some of your multitudinous writers would compile a circumstantial account of the resurrection of every classical author, and a minute narrative of the discovery of every celebrated piece of ancient sculpture, what an interesting volume might be formed! Numerous as they are, what are the books preserved in comparison with those that we have lost? The dead races of mankind scarcely outnumber the existing generation more prodigiously than do the books that have perished exceed those that remain to us. Men are naturally scribblers, and there has probably prevailed, in all ages since the invention of letters, a much more extensive literature than is dreamt of in our philosophy. Osymandias, the ancient King of Egypt, if Herodotus may be credited, built a library in his palace, over the door of which was the well-known inscription-" Physic for the Soul." Job wishes that his adversary had written a book, probably for the consolation of cutting it up in some Quarterly or Jerusalem Review; the expression, at all events, indicates a greater activity "in the Row" than we are apt to ascribe to those primitive times. Allusion is also made in the Scriptures to the library of the Kings of Persia, as well as to one built by Nehemiah. Ptolomy Philadelphus had a collection of 700,000 volumes destroyed by Cæsar's soldiers; and the Alexandrian Library, burnt by the Caliph Omar, contained 400,000 manuscripts. What a combustion of congregated brains:-the quintessence of ages-the wisdom of a world-all simultaneously converted into smoke and ashes! This, as Cowley would have said, is to put out the fire of genius by that of the torch; to extinguish the light of reason in that of its own funeral pyre; to make matter once more triumph over to eding 1 1 be gedy sad ma mind. Possibly, however, our loss is rather imaginary than real, greater in quantity than in quality. Men's intellects, like their frames, continue pretty much the same in all ages, and the human faculty, limited in its sphere of action, and operating always upon the same materials, soon arrives at an impassable acme which leaves us nothing to do but to ring the changes upon antiquity. Half our epic poems are modifications of Homer, though none are equal to that primitive model; our Ovidian elegies, our Pindarics, and our Anacreontics, all resemble their first parents in features as well as in name. Fertilizing our minds with the brains of our predecessors, we raise new crops of the old grain, and pass away to manure the intellectual field for future harvests of the same description. Destruction and reproduction is the system of the moral as well as of the physical world." 1 1 An anonymous book loses half its interest; it is the voice of the invisible, an echo from the clouds, the shadow of an unknown substance, an abstraction devoid of all humanity. One likes to hunt out an aunwob thor, if he be dead, in obituaries and biographical dictionaries; to chase him from his birth; to be in at his death, and learn what other offspring of his brain survive him. Even an assumed name is better than none; though it is clearly a nominal fraud, a desertion from our own to enlist into another identity. It may be doubted whether we have any natural right thus to leap down the throat, as it were, of an imaginary personage, and pass off a counterfeit of our own creation for genuine coinage. But the strongest semi-vitality, or zoophite state of existence, is that of the writers of Ephemerides, who squeeze the whole bulk of their individuality into the narrow compass of a single consonant or vowel; who have an alphabious being as Mr. A., a liquid celebrity under the initial of L., or attain an immortality of zig-zag under the signature of Z. How fantastical to be personally known as impersonal, to be literally a man of letters, to have all our virtues and talents entrusted to one little hieroglyphic, like the bottles in the apothecary's shop. Compared to this ignoble imprisonment, how vlight the punishment of the negligent Sylph, who was threatened to Be stopp'd in vials, or transfix'd with pins, an Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie, Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye; While clogg'd, he beats his silken wings in vain. So gross are my perceptions, that my mind refuses to take cognizance of these Magazine sprites, in their alphabetical and shadowy state. I animate these monthly apparitions, put flesh and blood around the bones of their letters, and even carry my humanity so far as to array theirs in appropriate garments. I have an ideal (not always a beau ideal) of every one of the contributors to the New Monthly, as accurate, no doubt, as the notion which Lavater formed of men's characters from their autograph. Sometimes, however, this Promethean art has been a puzzling process. One Essayist, wishing to immortalize himself, like the Wat Tylericide Mayor of London, by a dagger, assumed that note of reference as his signature, and occasioned me infinite trouble in providing a sheath of flesh. Another, who now honourably wields the sword of justice in the land of the convict and the kangaroo, used to distinguish his well-written papers by three daggers at once, taxing my imagination to the utmost by this tripartite individuality, and making expensive demands upon the wardrobe of my brain. A third held out a hand at the bottom of his page, beckoning me to its welcome perusal-a symbol which my eye (if the catachresis may be allowed) was always eager to grasp and shake, and to which my fancy affixed a body with as much confidence as he who conjured up a Hercules from a foot. But the most bewildering of these contractions of humanity was the subscription of a star; for, after a man had become sidereal and accomplished his apotheosis, it seemed somewhat irreverend to restore him to his incarnate state. "This raised a mortal to the skies, I brought down these Astræi from their empyrean, remodelled their frames, gave them a suit of clothes for nothing, and had before my mind's eye a distinct presentment of their identity. Even when we assume a literary individuality somewhat more substantial than this fanciful creation; when one is known, propriâ persona, as the real identical Tomkins, who writes in a popular magazine under the signature of any specific letter, to what does it amount?an immortality of a month, after which we are tranquilly left to enjoy an eternity-of oblivion. Our very nature is ephemeral: we "come like shadows, so depart." From time to time some benevolent and disinterested compiler endeavours to pluck us from the Lethean gulf, by republishing our best papers under the captivating title of "Beauties of the Magazines," "Spirit of the modern Essayists," or some such embalming words; but alas! like a swimmer in the wide ocean, who attempts to uphold his sinking comrade, he can but give him a few moments' respite, when both sink together into the waters of oblivion. We know what pains have been taken to appropriate Addison's and Steele's respective papers in the Spectator, distinguished only by initials. Deeming my own lucubrations (as what essayist does not?) fully entitled to the same anxious research, I occasionally please myself with dreaming that some future Malone, seated in a library, as I am at this present moment, may take down a surviving volume of the New Monthly, and naturally curious to ascertain the owner of the initial H, may discover by ferreting into obituaries and old newspapers, that it actually designates a Mr. Higginbotham, who lies buried in Shoreditch church. Anticipating a handsome monument with a full account of the author, and some pathetic verses by a poetical friend, he hurries to the spot, and after an infinity of groping, assisted by the sexton's spectacles, discovers a flat stone, which, under the customary emblems of a death's head and cross bones, conveys the very satisfactory information that the aforesaid Mr. Higginbotham was born on one day and died upon another. Of all the intervening period, its hopes and fears, its joys and miseries, its verse and prose, not an atom farther can be gleaned. And this it is to be a writer of Ephemerides! Verily, Mr. Editor, the idea is so disheartening, that I should be tempted to commit some rash act, and perpetrate publication on my own account, but that I have before my eyes the fate of certain modern Blackmores, impressing upon me the salutary truth, that if we must perish and be forgotten, it is better to die of a monthly essay than an annual epic. H. UGLY WOMEN. "Un homme rencontre une femme, et est choqué de sa laideur; bientôt, si elle n'a pas de prétentions, sa physionomie lui fait oublier les défauts de ses traits, il la trouve aimable, et conçoit qu'on puisse l'aimer; huit jours après il a des espérances, huit jours après on les lui retire, huit jours après il est fou." DE L'AMOUR. THE ancient inhabitants of Amathus, in the island of Cyprus, were the most celebrated statuaries in the world, which they almost exclusively supplied with gods and goddesses. Every one who had a mind to be in the vogue ordered his deity from those fashionable artists: even Jupiter himself was hardly considered orthodox and worshipworthy, unless emanating from the established Pantheon of the Cypriots; and as to Juno, Venus, Minerva, and Diana, it was admitted that they had a peculiar knack in their manufacture, and it need hardly be added that they drove a thriving trade in those popular goddesses. But this monopoly was more favourable to the fortunes than to the happiness of the parties. By constantly straining above humanity and aspiring to the representation of celestial beauty; by fostering the enthusiasm of their imaginations in the pursuit of the beau idéal, they acquired a distaste, or at least an indifference, for mortal attractions, and turned up their noses at their fair country women for not. being Junos and Minervas. Not one of them equalled the model which had been conjured up in their minds, and not one of them, consequently, would they deign to notice. At the public games, the women were all huddled together, whispering and looking glum, while the men congregated as far from them as possible, discussing the beau idéal. Had they been prosing upon politics, you might have sworn it was an English party. Dancing was extinct unless the ladies chose to lead out one another; the priests waxed lank and woe-begone for want of the marriage offerings: Hymen's altar was covered with as many cobwebs as a poor's box; successive moons rose and set without a single honeymoon, and the whole island threatened to become an antinuptial colony of bachelors and old maids. In this emergency, Pygmalion, the most eminent statuary of the place, falling in love with one of his own works, a figure of Diana, which happened to possess the beau idéal in perfection, implored Venus to animate the marble; and she, as is well known to every person conversant with authentic history, immediately granted his request. So far as this couple were concerned, one would have imagined that the evil was remedied; but alas! the remedy was worse than the disease. The model of excellence was now among them, alive and breathing; the men were perfectly mad, beleaguering the house from morn to night to get a peep at her; all other women were treated with positive insult, and of course the whole female population was possessed by all the Furies. Marmorea (such was the name of the animated statue) was no Diana in the flesh, whatever she might have been in the marble; if the scandalous chronicles of those days may be believed, she had more than one favoured lover; certain it is that she was the cause of constant feuds and battles in which many lives were lost, and Pygmalion himself was at last found murdered in the neighbourhood of his own house. The whole island was now on the point of a civil war on account of this philanthropical Helen, when one of her disappointed wooers, in a fit of jealousy, stabbed her to the heart, and immediately after threw himself from a high rock into the sea. Such is the tragedy which would probably be enacting at the present moment in every country of the world, but for the fortunate circumstance that we have no longer any fixed standard of beauty, real or imaginary, and by a necessary and happy consequence no determinate rule of ugliness. In fact there are no such animals as ugly women, though we still continue to talk of them as we do of Harpies, Gorgons, and Chimeras. There is no deformity that does not find admirers, and no loveliness that is not deemed defective. Anamaboo, the African prince, received so many attentions from a celebrated belle of London, that, in a moment of tenderness, he could not refrain from laying his hand on his heart and exclaiming, "Ah! madam, if Heaven had only made you a negress, you would have been irresistible!" And the same beauty, when travelling among the Swiss Cretins, heard several of the men ejaculating, "How handsome she is! what a pity that she wants a Goitre !" Plain women were formerly so common that they were termed ordinary, to signify the frequency of their occurrence; in these happier days the phrase extraordinary would be more applicable. However parsimonious, or even cruel, Nature may have been in other respects, they all cling to admiration by some solitary tenure that redeems them from the unqualified imputation of unattractiveness. One has an eye that, like Charity, covers a multitude of sins; another is a female Sampson, whose strength consists in her hair; a third holds your affections by her teeth; a fourth is a Cinderella, who wins hearts by her pretty little foot; a fifth makes an irresistible appeal from her face to her figure, and so on to the end of the catalogue. An expressive countenance may always be claimed in the absence of any definite charm; if even this be questionable, the party generally contrives to get a reputation for great cleverness; and if that too be inhumanly disputed, envy itself must allow that she is "excessively amiable." Still it must be acknowledged, that however men may differ as to details, they agree as to results, and crowd about an acknowledged beauty, influenced by some secret attraction of which they are themselves unconscious, and of which the source has never been clearly explained. It would seem impossible that it should originate in any sexual sympathies, since we feel the impulsion without carrying ourselves, even in idea, beyond the present pleasure of gazing, and are even sensibly affected by the sight of beautiful children: yet it cannot be an abstract admiration, for it is incontestable that neither men nor women are so vehemently impressed by the contemplation of beauty in their own as in the opposite sex. This injustice towards our own half of humanity might be assigned to a latent envy, but that the same remark applies to the pleasure we derive from statues, of the proportions of which we could hardly be jealous. Ugly statues may be left to their fate without any compunctious visitings of nature; but our conduct towards women, whom we conceive to be in a similar predicament, is by no means entitled to the same indulgence. We shuffle away from them at parties, and sneak to the other end of the dinner-table as if their features were catching; and as to their falling in love and possessing the common feelings of their sex, we laugh at the very idea. And yet these Parias |