his final rest in the arms of Immortality! Happy error! Enviable old man ! Flaxman is another living and eminent artist, who is distinguished by success in his profession, and by a prolonged and active old age. He is diminutive in person, like the others. I know little of him, but that he is an elegant sculptor, and a profound mystic. This last is a character common to many other artists in our days-Louherbourg, Cosway, Blake, Sharp, Varley, &c.—who seem to relieve the literalness of their professional studies by voluntary excursions into the regions of the preternatural, pass their time between sleeping and waking, and whose ideas are like a stormy night, with the clouds driven rapidly across, and the blue sky and stars gleaming between! Cosway is the last of these I shall mention. At that name I pause, and must be excused if I consecrate to him a petit souvenir in my best manner; for he was Fancy's child. What a fairy palace was his of specimens of art, antiquarianism, and virtù, jumbled all together in the richest disorder, dusty, shadowy, obscure, with much left to the imagination, (how different from the finical, polished, petty, modernised air of some Collections we have seen!) and with copies of the old masters, cracked and damaged, which he touched and retouched with his own hand, and yet swore they were the genuine, the pure originals. All other collectors are fools to him: they go about with painful anxiety to find out the realities:-he said he had them-and in a moment made them of the breath of his nostrils and of the fumes of a lively imagination. His was the crucifix that Abelard prayed to-a lock of Eloisa's hair-the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckingham -the first finished sketch of the Jocunda-Titian's large colossal profile of Peter Aretine-a mummy of an Egyptian king-a feather of a phoenix-a piece of Noah's Ark. Were the articles authentic? What matter?-his faith in them was true. He was gifted with a secondsight in such matters: he believed whatever was incredible. Fancy bore sway in him; and so vivid were his impressions, that they included the substances of things in them. The agreeable and the true with him were one. He believed in Swedenborgianism—he believed in animal magnetism- he had conversed with more than one person of the Trinity-he could talk with his lady at Mantua through some fine vehicle of sense, as we speak to a servant down-stairs through a conduit-pipe. Richard Cosway was not the man to flinch from an ideal proposition. Once, at an Academy dinner, when some question was made whether the story of Lambert's Leap was true, he started up, and said it was; for he was the person that performed it:-he once assured me that the knee-pan of King James I. in the ceiling at Whitehall was nine feet across (he had measured it in concert with Mr. Cipriani, who was repairing the figures)—he could read in the Book of the Revelations without spectacles, and foretold the return of Bonaparte from Elba-and from St. Helena! His wife, the most lady-like of Englishwomen, being asked in Paris what sort of a man her husband was, made answer-" Toujours riant, toujours gai." This was his character. He must have been of French extraction. His soul appeared to possess the life of a bird; and such was the jauntiness of his air and manner, that to see him sit to have his half-boots laced on, you would fancy (by the help of a figure) that, instead of a little withered elderly gentleman, it was Venus attired by the Graces. His miniatures and whole-length drawings were not merely fashionable-they were fashion itself. His imitations of Michael Angelo were not the thing. When more than ninety, he retired from his profession, and used to hold up the palsied hand that had painted lords and ladies for upwards of sixty years, and smiled, with unabated good-humour, at the vanity of human wishes. Take him with all his faults and follies, we scarce "shall look upon his like again!" Why should such persons ever die? It seems hard upon them and us! Care fixes no sting in their hearts, and their persons "present no mark to the foe-man." Death in them seizes upon living shadows. They scarce consume vital air: their gross functions are long at an end -they live but to paint, to talk or think. Is it that the vice of age, the miser's fault, gnaws them? Many of them are not afraid of death, but of coming to want; and having begun in poverty, are haunted with the idea that they shall end in it, and so die-to save charges. Otherwise, they might linger on for ever, and "defy augury!" MRS. DOBBS AT HOME. "The common chat of gossips when they meet." WHAT! shall the Morning Post proclaim How long they danced, till, sharp as hunters, The hour of parting-half past six ?— He who knows Hackney, needs must know Of Shoreditch Road, and when there blows A peep-almost to Norton Falgate. Invited all her friends to tea. The Row had never heard before Such double knocks at any door, And heads were popp'd from every casement, VOL. VI. No. 33.-1823. 28 DRYDEN. Some magnified them to eleven, Told Mrs. Grub she reckoned ten : Fat Mrs. Hobbs came second-then Came Mesdames Jinkins, Dump, and Spriggins, Tapps, Jacks, Briggs, Hoggins, Crump, and Wiggins. Dizen'd in all her best array, Our melting hostess said her say, As the Souchong repast proceeded, Stop Mrs. Jinkins, let me stir it, Lauk! Mrs. Dump, that toast seems dry, No doubt, Ma'am,-what a shame it is! You don't deal now with Mrs. Keats? No, she's a bad one :-Ma'am, she cheats.- Don't spare the toast, Ma'am, don't say no, I give folks plenty when I ax 'em, If you demolish'd the whole quart'n, Though bread is now a shameful price,- A charming garden, Mrs. Dobbs, Our smalls is all that we hang out.— La! Mrs. Tapps, do only look, And there's the church and burying-place, Next dish may dissipate your doubts, And give you less unlucky grouts: One more-you must-the pot has stood, There's Mrs. Spriggins in the garden ; Do you think her shawl, Ma'am, 's real Injy?— We do put clean things on our backs. Meat, Ma'am, is scand'lous dear.-Perhaps Yes, meat is monstrous dear all round; Thus on swift wing the moments flew, O'er Prospect Row resumed its reign, MEMOIRS OF A HAUNCH OF MUTTON. "I, in this kind of merry fooling, am nothing to you; so you may continue and laugh at nothing still."-The Tempest, THIS is the age for memoirs, particularly of royalty. Napoleon is making almost as much noise after his death as he did in his life-time; Marie Antoinette, by the assistance of Madame de Campan, has obtained a revival of her notoriety; and Louis Dix-huit has effected his escape to Coblentz only to fall into the claws of the critics, by proving that every king is not a Solomon. This epidemic is understood to be spreading among the rulers of the earth, and several of the London booksellers have already started for different capitals of Europe for the purpose, it is said, of treating with crowned authors. Fortunately there is no royal road to biography any more than to geometry; the right divine does not include all the good writing, nor has legitimacy any exclusive alliance with Priscian. Men who have brains inside may scribble as well as those who have crowns outside; beggars and thieves have given their own lives to the public; nay, even things inanimatea wonderful lamp, a splendid shilling, a guinea, have found historians; why then should the lords of the creation have all the memoirs to themselves? "All our praises why should Lords engross ? Rise, honest Muse, and sing" "The Haunch of Mutton," which, for aught that appears to the contrary, may claim a rectilinear descent from the Royal Ram eternized by Mother Bunch, and so be entitled to rank with the best imperial or kingly records that are now issuing from the Row. Into this investigation, curious as it would be, it is not my purpose to enter; it would be irrelevant to my title, which has only reference to sheep after they are dead, and designated as mutton; but I cannot refrain from noticing that even in this point of view the subject I have chosen is poetical, for a poet, like a Merino or South Down, is annually fleeced and sheared, and at last cut up by the critical dissectors; but he is no sooner dead than he acquires a new name, we sit down to his perusal with great satisfaction, make repeated extracts which we find entirely to our taste, and talk complacently of his rich vein, ready flow, his sweetness, tenderness, and so forth. Suffice it to say, that the sheep from which our hero, i. e. our haunch was cut, drew breath in the pastures of Farmer Blewett, of Sussex, whose brother, Mr. William Blewett, (commonly called Billy,) of Great St. Helen's, in the city of London, is one of the most eminent Indigo brokers in the Metropolis. The farmer having a son fourteen years of age whom he was anxious to place in the counting-house of the said Billy, very prudently began by filling his brother's mouth before he opened his own, and had accordingly sent him an enormous turkey at Christmas, a side of fat bacon at Easter, and at Midsummer the identical haunch of South Down mutton, whose dissection and demolition we have undertaken to immortalize. Ever attentive to the main chance, the broker began to calculate that if he asked three or four friends to dine with him he could only eat mutton for one, while he would have to find wine for the whole party; whereas, if he presented it to Alderman Sir Peter Pumpkin, of Broad-street, who was a dear lover of good mutton, and had besides lately received a consignment of Indigo of which he was anxious to propitiate the brokerage, he might not only succeed in that object, but be probably asked to dinner, get his full share of the haunch, and drink that wine which he preferred to all others-videlicet, that which he tippled at other people's expense. Whether or not he succeeded in the former aim, our documents do not testify, but certain it is that he was invited to partake of the haunch in Broad-street, (not being deemed a presentable personage at the baronet's establishment in Devonshire-place); Mr. Robert Rule, Sir Peter's bookkeeper and head clerk, who presided over the city household, was asked to meet him, as well as his nephew, Mr. Henry Pumpkin, a young collegian, whose affection for his uncle induced him to run up to London whenever his purse became attenuated, and who in his progress towards qualifying himself for the church, had already learnt to tie a cravat, drive a tandem, drink claret, and make bad puns. Four persons, as the baronet observed, were quite enough for a haunch of mutton, and too many for one of venison. "I shouldn't have waited for you, Harry," exclaimed the baronet, |