J.H. Wiffen, dating from the sentimental seclusion of Woburn Abbey, a song replete with all the grace and imagination of his "Ionian Hours."—Charles Lamb, the "deep-thoughted Elia," introducing us to the maidenly residence of his cousin Bridget; delighted with delighting; his fancy expatiating on a copious medley of subjects between the stiff Mandarins on the old fashioned china, and that Beaumont and Fletcher, the purchase of his rigid economy, ere his talents had brought him fame and fortune.—Letitia Landon "the English Sappho," a being existing but in the atmosphere of love and flowers; equally sensitive at the opening of a violet as at the shutting of a rose. But our list of the living is too extended; and we will speak of some of the departed.

Interspersed with the emanations of our existing bards, we have, occasionally, those precious morceaux which have been bequeathed us by the illustrious dead. Trifles, yet how esteemed! Remembrances of Byron, with his fiery impetuosity, spurning the trammels of worldly sorrow; and prescribing death as a panacea for his lamentable despair; yet subduing us with refined regrets, as he was wont, in his changing mood,

"To sun himself in heaven's pure day."

Shelley, misanthropically commencing with the turbulence of the chainless sea: a spirit matured to madness by the overawing and supernatural terrors of German romance: as he asserts himself to be, in his lamentation for the author of Endymion, one who

"Had gaz'd on Nature's naked loveliness, Acteon-like, until he fled away."

John Keates, forsaking the land of his fame, and prematurely resigning his "quiet breath," on that spot

"Where dwelt the muses at their natal hour;"

leaving to the less sensitive reviewers to prove, whether he had been "led astray by the light from heaven, or by his own clouded and tempestuous genius:"

"That fire within so fiercely burned That whence it came it soon returned."

Maturin, though corrupted and enervated by the follies and dissipation of the anti-poetic city, becoming, in his lucid intervals, "himself again," in the composition of a splendid dramaticle.—Henry Neele, the "martyr-student," inviting us to share in the intense admiration of intellect; forcibly demonstrating "that song is but the eloquence of truth"—but of him no more!

"The churchyard bears an added stone; The fireside shows a vacant chair."

Yet, however splendid the galaxy of literary stars may be, which illumine our Annuals, they owe no little of their lustre to the engravings. It fortuitously happens that we have not "a connoisseuring eye," or we should swell this paper beyond the limits prescribed by editorial complaisance, in the pages of "THE MIRROR." We are not ignorant, however, of the incomparable advancement which the science of engraving has made in the lapse of the last ten years; or how far it has left behind those mere scratches of the graver which lit up our young admiration when a boy. Two of these we will be impertinent enough to criticise, in spite of the affection with which we cherish the visionary recollection of the pictures of grandmother's parlour. The subjects were "courtship," and "matrimony." In the former, the Chesterfieldian lover was seen handing his chere amie (a lusty wench, with red ochre cheeks) over a remarkably low stile: whether the subject, or the manner of its execution had inspired the muse, is no matter; but beneath was the following:—

"In courtship, Strephon careful hands his lass Over a stile a child with ease might pass"

The next was "matrimony;" but, oh! "look on this picture and on this!" The careless husband, forgetting his capacious spouse, leaves her to scramble over a stile of alarming altitude, whilst his attention seems absorbed in the quarrel of two snarling terriers. Such conjugal uncourtliness elicits its merited censure in the cool satire of the accompanying motto:—

"But wedded Strephon now neglects his dame: Tumble or not, to him 'tis all the same."

The costume of these two figures was in accordance with the date of the hey-day of Ranelagh Gardens; and the outline of the foliage was about on a par with those designs we often see cut out of paper, by an ingenious schoolboy yet they may be adduced as criterions of the average merit appertaining to the generality of the productions of the burine of "the old school."

In closing this erratic dissertation on the Annuals, we may remark, that an interesting article might be written, descriptive of the reformation which gradually elevated the art of engraving to perfection—a history of its emerging from the inanities which flaunt in the window of Carver and Bowles, in St. Paul's Churchyard, and arriving at the exquisite perfection of such achievements as "Alexander's Visit to Diogenes," and "Quintus Curtius leaping into the Gulf."

* * H.

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The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 14, No. 396, October 31, 1829

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