And soft spiritual air comes breathing by me; Long has the night been, but one hour of waking [The vision disappears behind the closing clouds.] Ah! movest thou to thy home, sweet form? [He sinks back lifeless on the couch; his countenance, VANITIES IN VERSE. BY B. SIMMONS. I. A VIGIL. BYRON!-Rousseau !—and thou the youngest and Whose bread was bitterness, I here command If trust betray'd-youth blighted-life lost, be Come from your heaven-ay-or from the bigot's hell! Were ye not born with love for ever rushing Then come and watch with me-for, like ye, I That my voice peals the universe along II. TO A BEAUTIFUL GIRL, On her exhibiting a copy she had taken of a head from Raphael's great picture -THE TRANSFIGURATION—and asking, " Was not that painter inspired?" INSPIRED!-Could he, the Stoic cold, By sinful earth's offended Lord,) If God or painter be more bright— Could JULIAN-deep his master-mind That else were all too lustrous, while Pride mix'd with Love's triumphant smile: If thus, O bright One! thou could'st beam His unbelief, like sudden dream, Would melt to worship and amaze ; III. BALLAD.† Ir ever my wild spirit burns And every human trammel spurns As summer breezes light, Laughs at the hollow herd it scorns, And revels in its might— *The Emperor Julian-called by Christian writers the Apostate-to disprove the prediction in the Gospel, he ordered the Temple at Jerusalem to be rebuilt, but, from some natural or miraculous cause, the design was defeated. Suggested while swimming in Bantry Bay, Ireland. It is when casting off in mirth As debtless and the same I spring forth from her rocky side That crash and clash of waters wide How the bold billows that I ride IV. And how my buoyant senses bound O could I stem the world's dark wave As thus my watery way I cleave! Then give me back the billows brave! THE METROPOLITAN STAGE. * MEN may make professions, but there are unquestionably professions which make men. Painters are uniformly a fantastic race, jealous, capricious, and anxious, alike in and out of their painting rooms. Musicians, too, are a fantastic race, always brooding over imaginary neglects, irritated by imaginary injuries, and desperately determining once a week never to write a stave, or draw a bow, and thus punish the world for its injustice to the first of geniuses, in his own estimate. cal people, in all their grades, are the But the theatrimost fantastic of all. Of course there are exceptions among these classespainters who never wish the Royal Academy at the bottom of the Thames -fiddlers who are content with their wages and actors who think themselves lucky in getting any engage ment whatever. But the most fantastical of the whole race, and of all mankind, are the lessees and managers, or by whatever other names, out of Bedlam, may be called those ultraadventurous persons who hire theatres from that scarcely less unlucky species of mankind who have theatres to let. It is an established maxim, that there never was a theatre, however ruinous, which could not find some one mad enough to take it. Though it had made the last ten managers bankrupt, though as many hundred creditors were filling the world with outcries at their ruin; and though a Chancery suitthat last human accumulation of calamity-were in the fifth year of its progress, with no hope of a decision for fifty years to come; still, no sooner is the theatre announced to be in want of a lessee, than he is found; the man who has "Eaten of the insane herb That takes the reason prisoner," comes forward, offers ten or twenty thousand pounds a-year for an establishment which has never repaid half the money; pronounces that all the past failures were the fruits of blundering on the part of "the fools, his prede. affairs is the sure way to renown: excessors;" that his own mode of settling pends his capital in the first three months, his credit in the next three, the patience of the public in the next; and having thus handsomely quartered the year, reserving the final portion for quarrels with the actors, suits get a new term from the proprietors with the creditors, and attempts to his exit into the Queen's Bench. There by new "promises to pay," he makes place to be occupied by a successor he is not long solitary; he has left his within the next fortnight, equally sanguine, equally mad, equally luckless, who rejoins him among her Majesty's Thus the wheel goes round. detenus duly at the end of the season. in time. The two great theatres are advantage of being a shrewd, lively, "The Stage, both Before and Behind the Curtain. From Observations taken upon the spot, by Alfred Bunn, late lessee of the Theatres-Royal Drury Lane and Covent Garden." 3 vols. man, and few men have had better reason for being angry. He is sometimes compelled to plunge into black letter and talk of patents and parchments, like a lawyer; a style which would have made Democritus himself melancholy. But when he can get rid of these intolerable topics, and talk of men, women, and actors, (a third class of existence, curiously distinct from both the former,) he is alert, anecdotical, and very entertaining. But these are odd times. An advertisement at the beginning of the volumes announces that the publisher differs with the author. The point is the merits of the Garrick club, which Mr Bunn pronounces to be a sort of "ear of Dionysius," or, to speak more profanely, a "gossipshop" for the malecontents of the theatres, and the subscribers who are fools enough to listen to them. His publisher is startled at this plainness of speech, and enters a caveat against the consequences. He states himself a member of the club aggrieved, humbly thinks that Mr Bunn's authorship is no authority. But we would "take the ghost's word for a thousand pounds." The Garrick club is" a gossip-shop," and that is the honest truth, and not, some think, the worse of it for that reason; for what else is any club, or can any club be? except they are of that very sublime order which prescribes cold coffee, sullen looks, and profound silence, as the essentials of society. There are clubs in London where a gravity is observed, worthy of a churchyard. It must be admitted, on the other hand, that their stupidity is no necessary part of the foundation; and that if every one of them were modelled on the idea that men are actually human beings, that tongues were intended for speech, and that a slight inclination to mutual civilities is not a deadly breach of bienséance, they would not be an atom the less agreeable. And this absurd moroseness is not limited to the frown which the regular clubman puts on at the sight of some unlucky country gentleman or wanderer from the universities making his melancholy tour of the magnificent saloons, and desiring to have something else to talk to than the liststuffed stool, or the softest pillowed sofa. All fare nearly alike. We remember it to have been the complaint of Hope, the author of Anastasius—a man of fortune and fame-that, except when he happened to meet a personal friend, he had no more chance of conversation in one of the principal clubs (an expressly literary one which he named) than in a charnel. So, on the whole, we wish that, whatever may be the gossip of the Garrick, the custom would extend, and that the clubs of London would make it penal hence. forth for any member to keep silence on any subject on which he had any thing to say. We recommend the Garrick, in this essential point, as a "normal school" for all clubs metropolitan. To come to Mr Bunn's share of present celebrity. He has dashed into the whole subject of stages, actors, and management, with all the fearlessness of one who has abundance of facts at his disposal, with a good deal of pungency touching men and things which happen to have stung him at any time, and with more acuteness and pleasantry than we expected to have found in a "book of wrongs." He walks through the world with a whip in his literary hand; sometimes, like a French postillion, cracking it for the mere enjoyment of the sound; at other times sporting it over the necks of the passers-by, as if to show how dexterously he might apply it upon due occasion; but, at others, laying it on with a keenness which will make the sufferers remember him with much more sensibility than tenderness. He hates Macready, and hunts down his victim with a sort of exulting vengeance; others he involves, more or less, in his vengeance; and, as the result, supplies the world with the most unanswerable evidence that there is a little world within the walls of theatres, as busy and as bitter, as perplexing and as puzzled, as if it were managed by her Majesty's ministers, and consisted of mimics playing alternately at Windsor and Whitehall, instead of mimics rambling from Drury Lane to Covent Garden, and from Covent Garden to Drury Lane. We have certainly no wish to talk politics in talking of theatres; and yet they come across us even in the midst of painted curtains, caged lions, and those not less hazardous and unruly appendages to the stage, called actors and actresses. For the last fifty years, Whiggism has had "a finger |