religious retirement, arrived at her camp, and requested an immediate audience with the princess.

Being admitted into her presence, he informed her, that the place upon which she had fixed her tent, was sacred and unpolluted ground; and that, if she remained where she was, she would, in a very few days, be delivered of a fine boy, that should be the delight and support of his country.

Ruttanalee, who had, from her infancy, been taught to place implicit confidence in the predictions of holy men, instantly determined to continue in her present encampment, and dismissed the dervise with many protestations of regard, and great fervency of gratitude, for his favourable prognostications.

The holy man's prophecy was actually fulfilled in a very short period, and the delighted Ruttanalee was delivered of a most beautiful prince, who, at the particular request of the dervise, was named Viseldow, or the long expected child.

The happy news of the birth of a son was immediately conveyed to the imperial city, and so delighted was the monarch at these joyful tidings, that he instantly declared the young prince heir to the throne of Guzerat ; and being informed that his beloved Ruttanalee was charmed with the spot where she had been blessed by the favouring gods with a lovely boy, and was fearful of the jealousy of her rivals at his court, and did not wish to return, he ordered a spacious tank to be formed, and sent skilful artificers of every description, to build a large city, and surrounded it by strong fortifications; he also commanded the most eminent artists in his empire to .decorate the new city, by every species of costly ornament.

Having collected together the most celebrated artisans, from every part of his dominions, he placed them under the direction and control of one architect, a man of remarkable abilities, and exquisite taste, who had the good fortune to live till this extraordinary work was completed, which has not only immortalized his fame, as one of the most mighty men that ever existed, but which has ever been considered by the Hindoos, as one of the most astonishing productions of one man's genius, that the world has

ever seen.

So many years were necessary to complete this immense work, that by the time it was finished the young prince, who had been born on its scite, had succeeded his distinguished father, as monarch, or Rajah Guzerat ; and he was so much pleased with the place of his nativity, that he made it the seat of government; and having sent for those artists who had survived the undertaking, he gave them valuable presents, as tokens of his royal approbation; but wishing to distinguish the man, to whose very superiour talents the city owed its greatest beauty and chief advantages, above the rest, he desired him to name any reward for his services, that he could bestow, and he should directly have it.

The artist replied, that being happy in the gracious favour of his sovereign, he wanted neither money nor jewels; but as the place was yet without a name, he should deem it a high honour, and an adequate reward for his labour, if he might be permitted to give it the title of his own, which was Dhuboy. The prince immediately gave his consent, and it has ever retained the same name, even unto this day.

SIR,

دو

SATIRICAL

FROM THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE, LONDON.

Vox-et præterea nihil.

ONE of the correspondents in your last month's number, suggests a plan for handing down to posterity the way in which the languages of Europe are at present pronounced, by means of recording, in the orthography of the respective alphabets, the sounds of the inferiour animals: "which," he says, "have been, are, and will be the same, in all time coming.' He adduces instances to show, that in the days of Theocritus and of Plautus the sheep cried ba,a, and the cuckoo tu,tu. "These," he says, serve to point out, that the inferiour animals cried two thousand years ago exactly as they do at present, and also serve to show how the ancients sounded certain of the letters in their alphabet." Now I humbly conceive it to be impossible for any examples of this kind to prove both these points. They can prove only one; and I apprehend we express the cuckoo's note by a different orthography (the name of the bird) at present. The idea, however, is wonderfully ingenious and profound; and I shall be proud to contribute my trifling assistance in the furtherance of it. How greatly such an object is wanted, is well known to scholars. Mr. Godwin says in his Inquirer, that the most learned man now living does not understand the Latin tongue so well as a Roman milk-maid did; nor, with respect to its pronunciation, so well as the cows that she milked. The fol lowing are the particulars, which, after some research, and on consulting the best authorities, I have been able to collect in this view.

To your correspondent's expression of the cuckoo's note, I must (as I mentioned before) except. Shakspeare records it otherwise, in a song: The cuckoo then on every tree

Mocks married men, for thus sings he
"Cuckoo, cuckoo." O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear! *

Two notes, perhaps, thought to be ascertained with nearly equal precision, are those of the cock and the dog. Both these I shall produce from the same poet, in the song of Ferdinand and Ariel, in the first act of the Tempest:

Hark, hark bough-waugh: the watch-dog's bark,

Bough waugh.

Hark, hark: I hear the strain of strutting Chanticlere
Cry, cock-a-doodle-doo.

I confess, however, I have seen the former given with some variation, on an authority very respectable in matters of this kind, thus:

Bow-wow-wow-wow.-
Whose dog art thou?-
Little Tom Tinker's dog,
Bow-wow-wow-wow.

From the dog, the transition to the cat is obvious. George Alexander Stevens, in one of his Readings, introduces an amorous dialogue between two cats, beginning with their addressing each other by name as follows: He. Moll-row, Moll-row. She.

Curwell, Cur-well.

Shakspeare, however, softens the note in youth, in this line:

I'd rather be a kitten, and cry mew.

Theocritus, as your correspondent informs us, has preserved the cry of the sheep in his time: to which I add, that it is on printed record, without variation, among ourselves, in the farce of the Village Lawyer.

Swift has taken some pains to catch the neighing of a horse, in his in vention of houyhnhm; and (in the first chapters of his fourth voyage) a shorter cry of that animal, hhuun, hhuun. Job says of the war-horse (chap. xxxix. ver. 25) "He saith among the trumpets, ha, ha :" but I am not inclined to depend much on this, as I do not understand the original expression, to which I think our translators may perhaps have accommodated an interjection of our own. It is desirable to have the Hebrew sound in this place faithfully represented, that we may know what it is the horse really did say.

I have no written voucher for giving the bellowing of the cow as something like moo.

The cry of young pigs is on record in the lines which most of us have heard from our nurses:

This pig went to market, &c.

I shall not repeat the whole poem, as I can attain the purpose with more advantage by an old " quibble" of much simplicity, on sucking pigs, rescued from oblivion in a periodical publication of last month:

A fellow was to seek

Why pigs cry week, week, week,

And nothing else would repeat.
He was told they did cry

"Week, week, week," only

'Cause in three weeks they're kill'd to eat.

There is no deficiency of testimony concerning the Canary bird's chirping. Pretty Dick, and sweet, sweet, are, as far as my most diligent observation has extended, its universal interpretations.

The duck's note is generally called quack; but Pope, in his Imitation of Chaucer, writes it rather differently thus:

Miss stared; and grey ducke crieth, quaake.

I believe the hen's note is variously pronounced chuck.-cluck, and clock. Shakspeare gives us the owl's song in one of his own:

When blood is nipt, and ways be foul,

Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit, tu-whoo: a merry note, &c.

The jack-daw's note we have on the authority of Cowper, in an epigram on the speculations of that bird from a steeple:

He sees that this great round-about,

The world, with all its motley rout,
Church, army, physick, law,
Its customs and its businesses,
Are no concern at all of his;

And says-V
-What says he?-Caw.

The same note is given to the crow in the jest-books, by a traveller who heard that bird in Scotland. "Caw, caw, and be d-d, if you stay in such a country as this when you have wings to fly away."

The nightingale's song I remember seeing introduced in some juvenile verses, describing her to

sit snug,

And charm the ear with jug, jug, jug.

There is a small bird called, from its note, pee-wit; and Mr. Ashe, in the first volume of his entertaining Travels, lately published, mentions an American bird, which, for a similar reason, is named whip-poor-Will.

If I remember right from my school days, it is stated in one of the notes to the Delphin edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, that the frog's croak resembles the (French?) pronunciation of the Latin words sub aqua, sub aqua.

But I beg leave to suggest to your correspondent, whether his plan would not admit of being extended, so as to include likewise the sounds afforded by inanimate objects. For this extension there are certainly ample materials; a few of which at present occurring to my mind, I shall exhibit.

One of the most prominent instances at this season of festivity (Whitsuntide) is that of church-bells: but this indeed is rather scanty, hardly exceeding ding dong, though Shekspeare carries it one step further.

Let us all ring Fancy's knell.

I'll begin it; ding dong bell.

As for the prophecy found in them by Whittington, and the contradictory admonitions by a widow in a singular story related, I think, in the Curiosities of Literature, I abandon them as not much to the present purpose.

On speaking of a watch or a clock, it is unnecessary to add a single word of confirmation in assigning to them tick tack.

But a most valuable record of this kind is preserved in Tristram Shandy, where the sounds of the strings of a violin, in putting them into tune (they were of course, at the time, out of tune) are thus accurately delineated: Ptr-r-ing-twing-twang-prut, trut, trut, prut—tr-a, e,i,o,u—twang— trut, prut-diddle, diddle, diddle, diddle, diddle, diddle, dum: twaddle diddle, twiddle diddle, triddle diddle, twoddle diddle, twuddle diddle: prut, trut— krish, krash, krush: diddle, diddle, diddle, diddle, diddle, diddle, hum, dum, drum: trut prut, prut, trut.

There are two other expressions very well established for musical sounds, but I am reluctantly obliged to give them up; as, in the first of the following quotations, they are appropriated to no particular instrument, and, in the second, are applied to instruments which they do not seem at all to suit :

Some say that signior Bononcini,
Compared to Handel, 's a mere ninny.
Others aver that to him Handel

Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.

Strange that such difference there should be
'Twixt dweedle-dum, and dweedle-dee!

EPIGRAM,

Sound the trumpet, beat the drum,
Tweedle-dee, and tweedle-dum.

LITERARY MAGAZINE.

The sound of a postillion's whip is also given by Tristram Shandy as crack, rack, crack.

In Pope's Iliad, a spear or an arrow in the air may abundantly be seen to whiz.

A bow-string, when pulled, is said to twang, on the same authority; which is also confirmed by a song of Garrick's:

My heart would you hit,

Tip your arrow with wit,

And it comes to my heart with a twang.

The noise of a fly's wings in motion is given by Shakspeare:

Poor harmless fly,

That with his pretty buzzing melody,

Came here to make us merry, and thou hast kill'd him!

The same word, and humming, are applied to a bee.

The noise of a large bird's wings in rising is well expressed by Pope Windsor Forest) in the line,

See, from the brake the whirring pheasant springs.

The beat of a drum is pretty commonly agreed on. We have it in a military song in the surrender of Calais :

And our hearts beat the rub-a-dub feelings of joy. Nothing further occurs to me at present on this highly important subject, except that I believe the sound of a hunting-horn is represented by tantivy.

S.

MEMOIRS OF PRINCE PETER IVONITCH BAGRATION.

THIS illustrious prince and general was born in Georgia, of the royal stock of that warlike nation. Like most of the princes who derive their origin from the ancient dynasties of the vast empire of Russia, his family reside at Moscow, where they have a splendid palace, and live in all the pomp of eastern sovereignty.

Moscow may be compared to the former labyrinth of Thebes, not the residence of merely one king, but the abode of several. When the emperour Joseph the Second of Germany visited this city, he said to a nobleman who accompanied him: "Here all the chief princes of the country seem to have settled, surrounded each by his villages, his church, and his vassals." Hither the families, who count the names of the first Velike Knezes (the paramount princes of Muscovy) and the earliest Tzars, in the roll of their ancestors, retired. Formerly independent princes, but now drawn into the wide vortex of an empire which embraces nearly one quarter of the globe, and too proud to mingle with a race of courtiers round the imperial throne, they reside within the walls of the ancient capital, and there enjoy the advantages of royalty without its cares. Nothing can transcend the grandeur of these families inhabiting gorgeous palaces, attended by nume rous slaves superbly clad, and drawn in equipages glittering with all the decorations of Asiatick splendour. A traveller might suppose, on witnessing their retinue, their entertainments, and their courts, that he had quitted earth and descended into the subterraneous regions of the Genii, where their domes flame with gold, their robes blaze with gems, and breathe the fragrance of Arabia.

From such a luxurious abode, the sons of these princes emerge at a very early age. Nursed in the love of fame, as the only end worthy of their birth, they see that its track leads through the imperial camp, and thither they repair. So strongly is a military life the passion of this illustrious race of men, that they sometimes enroll their sons in the army within the year in which they are born. Twelve years of age is the usual period; and then, even youths of the first distinction do not commence their martial career as officers: they are not considered fit to command before they know how to obey.

Suworoff himself, the great model of our heroick Bagration, though the son of a general officer, was first enrolled in the Russian army as a fusileer in the guards of Seimonoff. In 1747, he served as a corporal; two years after he was promoted to the rank of serjeant, and employed as a courier during the campaigns in Poland and Germany. In 1754, he obtained a lieutenantcy; and after gradual promotions, at length arrived to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. "Then came his blushing honours thick upon