Epigram on Lieut. Eyre's Narrative of the Disasters at Cabul. By T. H. 263 Laying down the Law. By Thomas Hood, Esq. The Forge: a Poetical Romance of the Iron Age. By T. Hood, Esq. On the Duty of Evil Speaking. By The Lucky Bough; or, the Hop-gardens of Kent. By Edmund Car- The History of the Green Spar. By Elizabeth Youatt. The Flower-stealers: a Fact. By Laman Blanchard Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon, during the time spent by him in her father's house at St. Helena. By Mrs. Abell late (Miss Eliza Mr. Withering's Consumption and its Cure: a Domestic Extravaganza. The Orphan House of Brussels: a Confession Literature of the Month (for MAY): Lives of the Princes of Wales. By Folkestone Williams.-The Life of Sir David Wilkie. By Allan Cun- ningham. The King's Son. By Mrs. Hofland.-Handley Cross; or, (for JUNE): Windsor Castle; an Historical Ro- mance. By W. Harrison Ainsworth.-The Lost Ship; or, the At- lantic Steamer. By the author of "Cavendish."-Victor Hugo's Excur- sions up the Rhine.-History of our own Times, Vol. I.-The Seine, Moselle, Rhine, and Neckar. By J. M. Quin.-Burke's Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland.-The Stranger in India. By G. W. (for JULY): Diary of the Times of Charles II. By the Hon. H. Sidney (Earl of Romney), with Sidney's Correspond- ence. Edited by R. W. Blencowe, M.A.-Marmaduke Wyvil; or, the Maid's Revenge. By Henry W. Herbert, Esq.-Days and Nights of Salmon-fishing on the Tweed. By W. Scrope, F.L.S.-Letters (for AUGUST): Lives of the Queens of England. By Agnes Strickland.-Letters of Mary Queen of Scots, edited with THE NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. THE LONGEST HOUR IN MY LIFE: AN EXTRAVAGANZA. BY THE EDITOR. CHAP. I. "TIME," says Rosalind, in that delicious sylvan comedy called, "As You Like It""Time travels in divers paces with divers persons." And thence she prettily and wittily proceeds to enumerate the parties with whom he gallops, trots, ambles, or comes to a stand-still. And nothing can be truer than her theory. Old Chronos has indeed infinite rates of performance-from railway to snail-way. As the butcher's boy said of his horse, "He can go all sorts of paces-as fast as you like, or as slow as you don't." But hark! what says a clear, bell-like voice from the Horse-Guards, that "time is time, and one o'clock is one o'clock all the town over." True, old Regulator! The remark is as correct as striking, time is time, and the horological divisions are or should be synchronous from Knightsbridge to Whitechapel. But the old Mower is, like ourselves, a compound being-body and spirit. Hence he hath, as the Watchmakers say, "a duplex movement;" namely, Mechanical and Metaphysical; the first, governed absolutely by the march of the sun, and the swing of a pendulum; the second, determined by moral contingencies: the one capricious, as the ad libitum; the other exact as the tempo obligato of the musician. Thus the manifold bells of Londonsounding like the ancient chorus, a solemn accompaniment to the grand drama of Human Life-thus hundreds of iron tongues, simultaneously proclaim the current hour to the vast metropolis, yet with what different speed has time travelled from chime to chime with its millions of inhabitants-with the Bride and the Widow, the Marchioness in the May.-VOL. LXVIII. NO. CCLXIX. B ball-room, and the Milliner in her garret, the Lounger at his club, and the Criminal in the condemned cell! Of these "divers paces with divers persons," there is a memorable illustration in "Old Mortality," where Morton and the stern Covenanters, with opposite feelings, watch on the same dial-plate the progress of the hand towards the fatal black point, at which the hour and a life were together to expire. The Novelist has painted the victim "awaiting till the sword destined to slay him crept out of the scabbard gradually, and as it were by straw-breadths." The walls "seemed to drop with blood, and the light tick of the clock thrilled on his ear with such loud painful distinctness, as if each sound were the prick of a bodkin inflicted on the naked nerve of the organ." Here then was one of those persons whom Time gallops withal, whereas to the bloodthirsty Fanatics he crept on so leisurely, that Impatience could not refrain from giving the laggard a thrust forward on his course. In our Courts of Law, Civil and Criminal, the divers paces of Time are continually exemplified, and have been verified on oath by scores. of respectable witnesses. For example there was once a murder committed at Tottenham; and on the trial of the assassin, it became a point of judicial importance to determine the exact interval between two distant pistolshots. "Five minutes !" deposed Miss White, who had passed the evening in question tête-à-tête with her affianced sweetheart. "Fifteen," swore Mrs. Black, who had spent the same hours in vainly expecting a husband addicted to the alehouse. "Bless my soul and body!" exclaimed the Judge, naturally astonished at such a wide discrepancy; "the clocks in that part of the country must be sadly in want of regulation !" But his lordship himself was in error. The material wheels, springs, pendulums, and weights, worked truly enough, it was the moral machinery that was accountable for the variation. The rectification, however, was at hand. . The suburban village of Tottenham swarms, as is well known, with resident Members of the Society of Friends-a sect remarkable for punctuality, and the preciseness and uniformity of their habits-whose lives flow as equably as the sand of the hour-glass-whose pulses beat with the regularity of the pendulum. Accordingly, five Quakers who had heard the shots, were examined as witnesses; and, on their several affirmations, gave the interval between the two reports with little more variation than so many Admiralty Chronometers. As thus: Being actually the juste milieu, or a drab average, between the extreme statements of Black and White. CHAP. II. BUT to my personal experiences. Like my fellow-mortals in fair Rosalind's catalogue, I have found Time to resemble both the Hare and the Tortoise, sometimes as fleet as the quadruped, at others as slow as the reptile in his race. Many bright and brief days recur to my memory when he flew past with the speed of a Flying Childers; many dark and long ones, when he stepped as heavily and deliberately as the black horse before a hearse. All his divers paces are familiar to me-he has galloped, trotted, ambled, walked with me, and on one memorable occasion, seemed almost to stand stock-still. Never, oh never can I forget the day-long seconds which made up those monthlike minutes, which composed that interminable Hour-the longest in my whole life! "And pray, sir, how and when was that?" For the when, madam, to be particular, it was from half-past nine to half-past ten o'clock, A.M., on the First of May, new style, Anno Domini, 1822. For the how, you shall hear. At the date just mentioned my residence was in the Adelphi, and having a strong partiality for the study of Natural History from living specimens, it suited both my convenience and my taste to drop in frequently at the menagerie at Exeter Change. These visits were generally paid at an early hour, before town or country cousins called to see the lions, and indeed it frequently happened that I found myself quite alone with the wild beasts. An annual guinea entitled me to go as often as agreeable, which happened so frequently, that the animals soon knew me by sight, whilst with some of them, for instance the elephant, I obtained quite a friendly footing. Even Nero looked kindly on me, and the rest of the creatures did not eye me with the glances half shy and half savage which they threw at less familiar visiters. But there was one notable exception. The royal Bengal tiger could not or would not recognise me, but persisted in growling and scowling at me as a stranger, whom of course he longed to take in. Nevertheless there was a fascination in his terrible beauty, and quite in his enmity, that often held me in front of his cage, enjoying the very impotence of his malice, and recalling various tragical tales of human victims mangled or devoured by such striped monsters as the one before me; and, as if the cunning brute penetrated my thoughts, he would rehearse as it were all the man-eating manoeuvres of the species: now creeping stealthily round his den, as if skulking through his native. jungles, then crouching for the fatal spring, and anon bounding against the bars of his cage, with a short, angry roar, expressive of the most fiendish malignity. By the by, madam, did you ever hear of the doctrine of Instinctive Antipathies? Yes, sir, and Mr. Lamb or Mr. Hazlitt quotes an instance of two This same elephant once nearly killed an Irishman, for an insult offered to his trunk. The act was rash in the extreme, "but it was impossible," the Hibernian said, "to resist a nose that you could pull with both hands." strangers, who on meeting each other in the street immediately began to fight." Well, madam, there seemed to be some such original antipathy between me and the tiger. At any rate he took a peculiar pleasure in my presence in ostentatiously parading his means of offence. Sometimes, stretching out one huge muscular leg between the bars, he unsheathed and exhibited his tremendous claws, after which, with a devilish ogrelike grin, he displayed his formidable teeth, and then by a deliberate yawn indulged me with a look into that horrible red gulf, down which he would fain have bolted me in gobbets. The yawning jaws were invariably closed with a ferocious snap, and the brutal performance was wound up with a howl so unutterably hollow and awful, so cannibalish, that even at its hundredth repetition it still curdled my very blood, and thrilled every nerve in my body. "Lord! what a dreadful creature!" Very, ma'am. And yet that Carnivorous Monster, capable of appalling the heart of the bravest man, failed once to strike terror into one of the weakest of the species-a delicate little girl, of about six years old, and rather small for her age. She had been gazing at the Tiger very earnestly for some minutes, and what do you think she said? "Pray what, sir?" Oh, Mr. Cross, if ever that beautiful great pussy has young ones, do save me a kitten!" CHAP. III. If he APROPOS of Time and his divers paces, he notoriously goes very slowly-as Sterne vouches-with a solitary Captive, and of all solitary captives methinks he must go slowest with a caged wild beast. The human prisoner, gifted with a mind, can beguile the weary hours with dreams of the past or future-if of an intellectual turn, and educated, he can amuse himself with philosophical speculations, or mathematical calculations. He may even indulge in poetical composition. But a beast, a stupid, ignorant beast, has no such mental resources. struck a lyre it would be to immortal smash. Neither would it be of any avail to supply him with materials for those various handicrafts by the exercise of which the Philadelphian Solitaries described by Dickens contrived to lose and neglect the creeping foot of time in their confinement. A lion, if furnished with the whole stock of a marine-store shop, would never "manufacture a sort of Dutch clock from disregarded odds and ends," with a vinegar-bottle for the pendulum : neither would a tiger appear "in a white paper hat of his own making," though expressly provided with stationery for the purpose, from her Majesty's own office. It follows that wild animals in confinement must experience great weariness-in fact they obviously do suffer from ennui in no common degree. "How, sir? A vulgar, ill-bred wild beast, afflicted with the peculiar complaint of a woman of ton-of a lady of quality!" Precisely, madam. There is a case on record of a Lioness with all the symptoms of the complaint, and of her adoption of that fashionable antidote, a lapdog. |