well-built military and naval hospital, and a lighthouse. These different objects may be viewed from the esplanade, around which a carriage drive has been made, where most of the residents and garrison may be seen of an afternoon. The bands of the different regiments play here on certain days of the week at four o'clock. Leaving the esplanade you enter at once into the town of Corfu, which appears to be a perfect labyrinth; the streets are narrow and dirty, the houses appear to be of a very ordinary character, consisting of three or four stories; indeed, there seems to be a want of comfort about the whole place-the streets are generally crowded by the inhabitants and persons from the country, who are seldom without a pipe in their mouths, and, at this time of the year (January), a greggo on their backs. There are several places of worship in the town, and many of the churches are rich in ornaments and relics, with a profusion of candlesticks and pictures. The principal church is that of St. Spiridion, the guardian saint of the island, whose body is preserved in a large case or tomb in the church. His festival occurs on the 24th of December, and is celebrated with much pomp. The people of Corfu say that the Venetians made several attempts to carry the body of the saint (which they pretend yields to the touch, though he has been dead many hundred years) to Venice, but the saint always frustrated their design. This church is ornamented with many costly offerings, and the saint's worshippers pay him frequent visits, crossing themselves, and kissing his tomb, and what appeared to me to be holding a sort of conversation with him through the keyhole. He is also invoked before any particular undertaking, and I understood the boatman who brought our shooting party from Albania would that night pay a visit to his favourite saint, and return him his thanks for having granted us a prosperous voyage. Here among the people of the place "St. Spero does everything"-the people invoke him and swear by him.

At the extremity of the town stands Fort Neuf, built on a hill, which is very lofty, precipitous, and strongly fortified, and is perfectly bombproof, and provided with everything necessary for defence; the barracks are good, and a very large and excellent messroom, with officers' apartments, has lately been built. The markets for fish and meat, as also for vegetables, are good, and appear to have been built within the last few years. I cannot speak in very high terms of the meat market, but the one for fruit and vegetables is as neat and clean and as well provided as any market in England.

Some of the drives and rides in the neighbourhood of Corfu are beautiful, and the roads are excellent, quite as good as those of M'Adam himself. The One-gun Battery is a favourite lounge, where on a fine evening may be seen most of the fashion of the place; it is situated about two miles and a half from the town; the road to it, leading you through a forest of olive trees and some vineyards, renders the ride or drive a very pleasant one; added to this, you have an excellent view of a small island called the " Sail of Ulysses," in allusion to the galley of the Phæacius, which on her return from having conveyed Ulysses to Ithaca, was overtaken by the vengeance of Neptune, and petrified within sight of the port, as Homer in his Odyssey says

ὴ δὲ μάλα σχεδόν.

From the One-gun Battery you have a most beautiful view of the sea,

and the surrounding country covered with olive and orange trees. A cannon was formerly placed there, from whence the name "One Gun." The battery overhangs a strait, which admits the waters of the sea into a lake, which renders Corfu exceedingly unwholesome during the summer and autumn. In the vicinity of the battery are many ruins, which point out the position of the ancient town of Corcyra; the ruins of the Temple of Neptune are to be seen near the Casino of the Lord High Commissioner; they overlook the sea, and are situated in a beautiful part of an olive grove. On leaving the One-gun Battery to return to Corfu, the pedestrian should bear away to the right, through the olive groves; he will then enjoy a fine wild walk, and will pass by the ruins of the Temple of Neptune, and through the gardens of the Casino, where some of the most delicious oranges may be gathered by having a little conversation with the gardener. I shall never forget the delicious flavour of some of the oranges I picked off one particular tree, though indeed all I picked in these delightful gardens were far superior to any I could buy in Corfu.

(To be continued.)

THE UNSUCCESSFUL MAN;

OR,

PASSAGES IN THE LIFE OF TILBURY NOGO, ESQ.

BY FOXGLOVE.

CHAP. XXIV.

Davy. Marry sir, thus-those precepts cannot be served and again sir, shall we sow the headland with wheat?

Shallow. With red wheat, Davy.

Dary. Now, sir, a new link to the bucket must needs be had.-And, sir, do you mean to stop any of William's wages about the sack he lost the other day at Hinkley fair?"

KING HENRY IV,

Glowing hath ever been the poet's description of the simplicity of rustic life; and much hath plain English been swollen into stanzas, and distorted into rhyme, for the purpose of enlarging on the fable of the "town and country mouse.' But paradoxical as it may appear, I am inclined to believe that those, who in theory are most enthusiastic in their admiration of a country life, are the very men, Londoners by destiny, and cockneys in grain, for whom the charms of such a vegetable existence are chiefly enhanced by the impossibility of their following out their arcadian ideal, and with whom, as with the rest of us, in this discontented world, desire springs most intensely from separation. That poetical wag, and polished satirist, who delighted the rank and fashion of ancient Rome with his life-like descriptions, as with his dancing numbers, and bequeathed the name of Horace to our later age, as a

type of all that is amusing and agreeable to the man, albeit somewhat unpopular with the school-boy, modestly expresses the summit of his dearest wishes to be a small farm, a few rods of wood, and a clear and rippling stream; while the very vividness with which, in a few lines, he places before us the sunny slope, the shady grove, and the refreshing waters, proves that in his yearning after the clear atmosphere, and the balmy breeze of the country, he was at heart essentially a cockney. But had the bard been destined to sit down for life under his arbutus trees, removed from the charms of his Augustan coterie, as from "the smoke, the riches, and the noise of Rome;" had he been compelled to earn an appetite for his garlick pottage, by the daily superintendence of his Sabine clod-poles, cleaving his Sabine clods; had his conversation with his neighbours been limited to the price of wheat, and his computation of time been reckoned by the yearly epochs of hay-making and harvest, we may fairly conclude that the sociable minstrel would have found such an existence a very poor exchange for the life, the fun, and the luxurious repasts of the capital, and would have left us many a terse and classical interpretation of that too well-known substantive which the French call ennui, and the English bore.

Well, I too have pined for a country-life; I have got up on a fine morning, in London, when the sun, for want of any thing better, was wasting his gilding on the chimney-pots, and I have longed for the smiling pastures, the breezy uplands, and the hill and dale of the open country; have thought that the summit of earthly happiness was to walk round the farm before breakfast, the acme of human comfort to make your own butter and eat your own mutton; but it is a dangerous experiment for any man whose youth has been passed in a metropolitan sphere of life, using the expression in its widest sense, and thereby including all the pleasures and amusements of Windsor, Ascot, Epsom, Melton-aye, even the Highlands of Scotland, which are enjoyed by London people, in a London manner-I say it is a dangerous experiment for a man educated in such a school to sit down for life in some quiet nook of a rural parish, and to suppose that because he has sometimes been bored with London, he is for that reason fitted to live entirely in the country. I have always fancied that to fill the situation effectively a man should have been bred a farmer; and although we see many noblemen and gentlemen, when they have done with the more stirring avocations of the court, the camp, and the senate, assuming the yellow gaiters, and out-of-door habits of agricultural prosperity, I have never been given to understand that their cultivation of the soil is based upon a method either so convenient or so profitable as that of the honest yeoman, "whose farm on his honour's estate is the same that his grand-father tilled;" or that, much as they may study its nature, and argue upon its minutiæ, they ever attain that success in the profession of our first parents, which they have achieved in the busier avocations of their early life. For my own part, sparingly as fortune has ever smiled upon my endeavours, I think my farming has been the worst speculation of all; nor can I be convinced that I was in my right senses when, having determined to settle permanently in the west, and as near as possible to Topthorne Lodge, I bought the small estate and commodious farm-house of Wild-wood, formerly the property of my friend Segundo, for which I paid fully one-third more than its marketable value,

and on three hundred acres of which, I determined, at my own risk, to put in practice my own ideas as to the tillage of the soil. Behold me then settled in life; married to the handsome widow, and truth to say somewhat proud of the feat; inhabiting a comfortable though small and detached house, furnished by my wife's tact in a luxurious manner, and what people call comparatively at small expense, qualified as a magistrate, respected as a land-owner, and, in short, learning to be a country gentleman. And now began a series of troubles and annoyances, which innocuously as they may fall on the heads of some callous individuals, are to an indolent and sensitive man like barbed darts and venomed arrows. Morning, noon, and night, there was no leisure and no repose. Time hung heavily on my hands; yet had I never an hour to myself. An out-of-door life was what I wanted to accomplish by my new pursuit; yet every one connected with the farm would come and talk to me in my own sitting room, "larding" the neat carpet with mud of every different description of fertility. If I wished to shoot, my beat had to be regulated, not by the wildness of the birds and the lay of the ground, but by the necessity of diverging into this "close" to see if the fence had been mended, or splashing through that meadow to ascertain if the drains were running properly. Domestic details were bad enough; but the carelessness of the butcher, or the stupidity of the grocer, were as nothing compared to that which was done which should have been left undone, and never commenced which should have been completed, at that infernal farm. Probably a diary of one of the many weary days at Wild-wood will give my sympathising reader a better idea of rural felicity than all the lamentations which I could pour forth upon this plaintive theme. Imagine, in the first place, a pretty little house in a most picturesque situation, the building itself combining the attractive. ness of a cottage with the conveniences of a mansion; imagine it fancifully furnished and thoroughly warmed, with good stabling and outhouses attached, and plenty of room for servants-that sine qua non without which peace is not. Imagine a surrounding country, beautiful in all the undulating richness peculiar to the west; a manor fairly stocked with game, and a neighbourhood in which good dinners were plentiful as black-berries, and old port common as ditch-water; and conceive all these agreeable sundries being spoiled and alloyed by the proximity of that confounded three-hundred acres of arable land.

But to return to the diary. Seven o'clock brings a summons to arise; and although an early hour for a bride-groom, it must be attended to, because "Jacob," my bailiff and factotum, has appointed to see me "fust thing i'th' marning," about giving the men their orders with regard to cutting an unnecessary drain to an unheard-of depth. I yawn my way to my dressing-room, where there is no fire, for the new housemaid is not an early riser, and "master" is too green at the trade to have yet become much of a disciplinarian. Luke-warm water produces a rugged shave, and induring myself in dread-nought attire, I accompany "Jacob" through a drizzling rain to the "thirty acres,' there to find two of the men cannot come because to-day happens to be "Weatherley revel,” and for all the good I have done by my exertions I might just as well have remained in bed. A second toilette fits me for breakfast, and I look forward to a comfortable and domestic meal, the novelty of having my tea made by Mrs. Nogo (I cannot quite bring myself to call her

"

Nelly") not having yet worn off. The widow, however, has had experience in the ways of the world, and one of the lessons which it has inculcated is never to hurry herself-above all, in such an important ceremony as the toilette; so I am reduced to the painful alternative of beginning breakfast without her (in which case I shall appear churlish, and have my tea badly made), or of sitting down to the-day-beforeyesterday's paper, already conned through, and last night fallen asleep over, to wait in patience for the arrival of my better half. Down she comes at length, very nicely dressed, but not feeling "very well," which I have already learned means being slightly out of sorts, and is a bad beginning for the day. "My dear, I wish you would speak to James about that tea-pot; it is disgracefully cleaned, and nothing spoils servants so much as passing over these things.' James is the new footman, a sixfoot magnifico, and I should just as soon think of reprimanding Julius Cæsar; but I dare say Mrs. N. will do it for me, and twice as effectually. You'll drive me to the Lodge, Til., after luncheon," adds my wife, in an accent I never quite like to disobey; and although I had meant to get a quiet afternoon's shooting, I express a ready compliance, and breakfast progresses comfortably; I am just going to have a second cup of tea, when enter stately James, as though he were announcing a Duke, to say that "Farmer Veal" is waiting to see me in the study, as servants always persist in calling the apartment where "master" keeps his guns, &c.; and as the gentle Mrs. N. signifies "I had better speak to him at once and have done with it," I forego my other cup and hasten to an interview with the yeoman, having for its object the purchase of a certain quantity of what are termed store-pigs." It is by this time getting towards noon, the hour at which I was once accustomed to enjoy the double luxury of a book and a cigar; but these "littering habits," as Mrs. N. calls them, I have now entirely abandoned for ever, and contenting myself with the unsatisfactory substitute of a tooth-pick, I accompany "Jacob" to the yard to inspect a new arrival in the shape of a famous short-horned bull, whom I have purchased at the price of a hunter, but whom I dare not approach with any of the familiarity with which I should handle the latter animal. "Jacob" thinks I paid too much money for him, in which opinion I cordially coincide, and the morning passes off in a series of fault-findings with inefficient bricklayers and dull labourers, who only seem to comprehend how much more profitable it is to work by "the day" than by "the foot." Luncheon, in which I detect more of yesterday's dinner than I could easily believe to have survived, is interrupted by the collector of rates and taxes (imposts which I fancy my predecessor Segundo never dreamed of paying), and that functionary seems disposed to visit upon the successor all the deficiencies incurred by the previous owner. "Have you ordered the pony-carriage, Til.?" says Mrs. N.; and my multifarious Occupations having prevented the morning visit to the stable, which I had always looked forward to as so principal a charm of a regular life, I am forced to confess that I have neglected to do so, and to swallow as I best may the involuntary exclamation of Dear, how stupid!" which escapes from the lips that have so lately vowed "to love, honour, and obey." The filth of the straw-yard has made it necessary to adjourn once more to the dressing-room, before I am fit to enter a carriage of any description; and this time, with a pardonable anxiety to appear to

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