that the present boasts to be the contrary. Indeed? I appeal then to the oracle that pronounces Socrates the most enlightened of men, because he professed himself to be in the dark. The converse, and the necessary truth of the converse, are alike obvious: besides, as already hinted, in time all light must needs be in the dark, as having neither reflection nor absorption; yet may, nevertheless, retain its prenomen without inconsistency, by a slight change in the last syllable, by a mere-for "ed" read "ing." For whatever scruples may arise as to its being an enlightened age, there can be no doubt that it is an enlightening one—an era of enlighteners, from the Gas Light Company to the dazzling Illuminati in the Temple of Reason-not forgetting the diffusers of light from the Penny-Tract-Pedlary, nor the numberless writers of the small, but luminous works on arts, trades, and sciences, natural history, and astronomy, all for the use of children from three years old to seven, interwoven with their own little biographies and nursery journals, to the exclusion of Goody Two Shoes, as favoring superstition, by one party; and of Jack the Giant-killer, as a suspicious parody on David and Goliah, by the other.

Far, far around, where'er my eyeballs stray,
By Lucifer! 'tis all one milky-way !

Or, as Propria Quæ Maribus, speaking (more prophetico, et proleptice) of the Irradiators of future (i. e. our) Times long ago observed, they are common, quite a common thing!

Sunt commune Parens, Authorque; Infans, Adolescens ;

Dux;

Exlex; bifrons; Bos, Fur, Sus atque Sacerdos.

So far, at least, you will allow me to have made out my position. But if by a dark age you mean an age concerning which we are altogether in the dark; and as, in applying this to our own, the Subject and Object, we and the age become identical and commutable terms; I bid adieu to all reasoning by implication, to all legerdemain of inferential logic, and at once bring notorious facts to bear out my assertion. Could Hecate herself, churning the night-damps for an eye-salve, wish for an age more in the dark respecting its own character, than we have seen exemplified in our next-door neighbor, the Great Nation, when, on the bloodless altar of Gallic freedom, she took the oath of peace and good-will to all mankind, and abjured all conquests but those

a stu

of reason? Or in the millions throughout the continent, who believed her? Or than in the two component parties in our own illustrious isle, the one of whom hailed her revolution as pendous monument of human wisdom and human happiness;" and the other calculated on its speedy overthrow by an act of bankruptcy, to be brought about or accelerated by a speculation in assignats, corn, and Peruvian bark ? Or than in the more recent constitutional genius of the Peninsula

What time it rose, o'er-peering, from behind,

The mountainous experience, high upheaped
Of Gallic legislation—

and "taught by others' harms," a very ungallic respect for the more ancient code, vulgarly called the Ten Commandments, left the lands as it found them, content with excluding their owners -owners of four parts out of five, at least, the church and nobility-from all share in their representation? Or when the same genius, the emblem and vicegerent of the present age in Spain, poising the old indigenous loyalty with the newly-imported state-craft, secured to the monarch the revenue of a caliph, with the power of a constable? But Piedmont! but Naples-the Neapolitans the age of patriotism, the firm, the disinterestedthe age of good faith and hard fighting-of liberty or death! yea, and the age of newspapers and speeches in Britain, France, and Germany—the uncorrupted I mean (and the rest, you know, as mere sloughs, rather than a living and component part, need not be taken into the calculation)—were of the same opinion! A dream for Momus to wake out of with laughing!

But enough! You are convinced on this point,—at least you retract your objection. And now what else? Does my history require, in the way of correspondency, a time of wonders, a revolutionary period? Does it demand a nondescript age? Should it, above all (as I myself admit that it should), be laid in an age “without a name," and which, therefore, it will be charity in me to christen by the name of the Polypus? An age, where the inmost may be turned outside-and "Inside out and outside in," I at one time intended for the title of my history— where the very tails, inspired by the spirit of independence, shoot out heads of their own? (Thanks, with three times three, to Ellis and Trembley, the first historiographers of the Polypus

realm, for this beautiful emblem and natural sanction of the SOVEREIGNTY OF THE PEOPLE!) All, all are to be found in the age we live in-whose attributes to enumerate would exhaust the epithets of an Orphic hymn, and beggar the Gradus ad Parnassum !—All, all, and half besides-the feasibility of which I first learnt during the last war, at two public dinners severally given, one by Scottish, and the other by Irish patriots, where each assigned to their countrymen three fourths of our whole naval and military success. In each case, à priori, the thing was possible, nay, probable; as each meeting the assertion passed nem. con. though there were eye-witnesses, if not pars-maximists present-and both were so much in earnest, that I could not find it in my heart to disbelieve either. But this is a digression. Or it may be printed as a parenthesis. All close thinkers, you know, are apt to be parenthetic.

One other point, and I conclude. You are a mighty man for parallel passages, Dick! a very ferret for hunting out the pedigree and true parentage of a thought, phrase, or image. So far from believing in equivocal generation, or giving credit to any idea as an Autochthon, i. e. as self-sprung out of the individual brain, or natale solum, whence (like Battersea Cabbages, Durham mustard, Stilton cheese, &c.) it took its market name, I verily suspect you of the heresy of the Præ-Adamites! Nay, I would lay a wager that the Thesis for your Doctor's Degree, should you ever descend from your correctorship of typical errata to that of misprints in the substance, would be: quod fontes sint nullibi. In self-defence, therefore, by warrantable anticipation,-a pregnant principle, Richard! by virtue of which (as you yourself urged at the time) the demagogues that threw open the election of the Mayor of Garrett, hitherto vested in the blackguards of Brentford exclusively, to the blackguards of the country at large, exposed us to an invasion from the aristocracies of Tunis and Algiers! N.B. Clarendon and the Quarterly are of the same opinion-prospectively, I say, for informers, and informatively for the reader, I make known the following:

Some ten or twelve years ago, as the Vassals of the Sun, i. e. the Bodies, count their time, being in the world of spirits, as above-mentioned, and in the Parnassian quarter, in literary chitchat with Lucian, Aristophanes, Swift, Rabelais, and Molière, over a glass of green gooseberry wine (since the departure of the

last-named spirit, articles of French produce have been declared contraband in the spiritual Parnassia)-I read them a rough precxistent, or as we say here, copy, of Maxilian. When who should be standing behind my chair, and peeping over my shoulder (I had a glimpse of his face when it was too late, and I never saw a more Cervantic one), but a spirit from Thought-land (North Germany I should say), who, it seems, had taken a trip thither, during the furlough of a magnetic crisis, into which his Larva had been thrown by Nic, senior, M.D.* and a Mesmerist still in great practice. Well! there would have been no harm in-this, for in such cases it was well known, that the spirit, on its return to the body, used to forget all that had happened to it during its absence, and became as ignorant of all the wondrous things it had seen, said, heard and done, as Balaam's ass. Γίνεται δ ̓ αὖ ὄνος ὁ ὄνος ἐξαγγελιζόμενος. But unluckily, and only a few months before, Mr. Van Ghert (who, as privy counsellor to the King of the Netherlands, ought to have known better) had, by metaphysical skill, discovered the means of so softening the wax tablet in the patient's cranium, that it not only received, but retained, the impression from the movements of the soul, during her trance, resuggesting them to the patient sooner or later, sometimes as dreams, and sometimes as original fancies. Thus it chanced, that the great idea, and too many of the sub-ideas, of my ideal work awoke, in the consciousness of this Prussian or Saxon,Frederic Miller is the name, he goes by-soon after the return of the spirit to its old chambers in his brain. Alas! my unfortunate intimacy with a certain well-known "Thief of Time," for which my originality had suffered on more than one former occasion, was part in fault! But, be this as it may, so it chanced, however, that before I had put a single line on paper (my time being, indeed, occupied in determining which of ten or twelve pre-existents I should transcribe first) out came the surreptitious duplicate, with such changes in names, scene of action, thought,

* See "Archiv des thierischen Magnetismus," edited by Professor Eschenmiayer and Co. I mentioned one of Dr. Nic's cases, with a few of Doctors Kieser's and Nasse's, and of Mr. Van Ghert's, to Lemuel Gulliver; but I found him strangely incredulous. He (he said) had never seen any thing like it. But what is that to the purpose? What does any one man's experience go for, in proving a negative at least? I could not even learn from him that he had ever met with a single Meteorolithe, or sky-stone, on its travels from the volcanoes of Jupiter, or the moon, to our earth.

images, and language, as the previous associations, and local impressions of the unweeting plagiarist had clothed my ideas in. But what I take most to heart, it so nearly concerning the credit of Great Britain, is, that it came out in another country, and in high Dutch! I foresee what my anticipator's compatriots will say —that admitting the facts as here related, yet the Anselmus is no mere transcript or version, but at the lowest a free imitation of the Maxilian or rather that the English and German works are like two paintings by different masters from the same sketch, the credit of which sketch, secundum leges et consuetudines mundi corpuscularis, must be assigned to the said Frederic Miller by all incarnate spirits, held at this present time in their senses, and as long as they continue therein; but which I shall claim to myself, if ever I get out of them. And so farewell, dear Corrector! for I must now adjust myself to retire bowing, face or frontispiece, towards THE READER, with the respect due to so impartial and patient an Arbiter from the

AUTHOR.

MAXILIAN.

FLIGHT I.

It was on a Whitsunday afternoon-the clocks striking five, and while the last stroke was echoing in the now empty churches —and just at the turn of one of the open streets in the outskirts of Dublin--that a young man, swinging himself round the corner, ran full butt on a basket of cakes and apples, which an old barrow-wife was offering for sale; and with such force, that the contents shot abroad, like the water-rays of a trundled mop, and furnished extempore-on the spur of the occasion, as we say—a glorious scramble to the suburban youngsters, that were there making or marring this double holiday. But what words can describe the desperate outburst, the blaze of sound, into which the beldam owner of the wares exploded! or the "boil and bubble" of abuse and imprecation, with which the neighbor gossips, starting from their gingerbread and whiskey stands, and clustering round him, astounded the ears and senses of the ill-starred aggressor! a tangle-knot of adders, with all its heads protruded towards him, would not have been more terrific. Reeling with surprise and shame, with the look and gesture of a child, that, having whirled