In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles and colours. In France, meliora probant, deteriora sequuntur – the people are too much a race of gadabouts to maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a delicate […]

Intensos rigidarn in frontern ascendere canos Passus erat—- -Lucan–De Catone —a bristly bore. Translation LET us hurry to the walls,” said Abel-Phittim to Buzi-Ben-Levi and Simeon the Pharisee, on the tenth day of the month Thammuz, in the year of the world three thousand nine hundred and fortyone–let us hasten to the ramparts adjoining the […]

Pestis eram vivus – moriens tua mors ero. — Martin Luther HORROR and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to this story I have to tell? Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the interior of Hungary, a settled […]

DURING the autumn of 18–, while on a tour through the extreme southern provinces of France, my route led me within a few miles of a certain Maison de Sante or private mad-house, about which I had heard much in Paris from my medical friends. As I had never visited a place of the kind, […]

What chance, good lady, hath bereft you thus? –COMUS. IT was a quiet and still afternoon when I strolled forth in the goodly city of Edina. The confusion and bustle in the streets were terrible. Men were talking. Women were screaming. Children were choking. Pigs were whistling. Carts they rattled. Bulls they bellowed. Cows they […]

Slid, if these be your “passados” and “montantes,” I’ll have none o’ them. — NED KNOWLES. THE BARON RITZNER VON JUNG was a noble Hungarian family, every member of which (at least as far back into antiquity as any certain records extend) was more or less remarkable for talent of some description — the majority […]

CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE EXACT SCIENCES. Hey, diddle diddleThe cat and the fiddle SINCE the world began there have been two Jeremys. The one wrote a Jeremiad about usury, and was called Jeremy Bentham. He has been much admired by Mr. John Neal, and was a great man in a small way. The other […]

AS it is well known that the ‘wise men’ came ‘from the East,’ and as Mr. Touch-and-go Bullet-head came from the East, it follows that Mr. Bullet-head was a wise man; and if collateral proof of the matter be needed, here we have it — Mr. B. was an editor. Irascibility was his sole foible, […]

A Tale With a Moral. “CON tal que las costumbres de un autor,” says Don Thomas de las Torres, in the preface to his “Amatory Poems” “sean puras y castas, importo muy poco que no sean igualmente severas sus obras”— meaning, in plain English, that, provided the morals of an author are pure personally, it […]

I WILL now play the Oedipus to the Rattleborough enigma. I will expound to you — as I alone can — the secret of the enginery that effected the Rattleborough miracle — the one, the true, the admitted, the undisputed, the indisputable miracle, which put a definite end to infidelity among the Rattleburghers and converted […]

IT’S on my visiting cards sure enough (and it’s them that’s all o’ pink satin paper) that inny gintleman that plases may behould the intheristhin words, “Sir Pathrick O’Grandison, Barronitt, 39 Southampton Row, Russell Square, Parrish o’ Bloomsbury.” And shud ye be wantin’ to diskiver who is the pink of purliteness quite, and the laider […]

Quand un bon vin meuble mon estomac,Je suis plus savant que Balzac –Plus sage que Pibrac;Mon brass seul faisant l’attaqueDe la nation Coseaque,La mettroit au sac;De Charon je passerois le lac,En dormant dans son bac;J’irois au fier Eac,Sans que mon coeur fit tic ni tac,Présenter du tabac.French Vaudeville THAT Pierre Bon-Bon was a restaurateur of […]

THE symposium of the preceding evening had been a little too much for my nerves. I had a wretched headache, and was desperately drowsy. Instead of going out therefore to spend the evening as I had proposed, it occurred to me that I could not do a wiser thing than just eat a mouthful of […]

IT should not be doubted that at least one-third of the affection with which we regard the elder poets of Great Britain should be-attributed to what is, in itself, a thing apart from poetry-we mean to the simple love of the antique-and that, again, a third of even the proper poetic sentiment inspired by their […]

IN speaking of the Poetic Principle, I have no design to be either thorough or profound. While discussing, very much at random, the essentiality of what we call Poetry, my principal purpose will be to cite for consideration, some few of those minor English or American poems which best suit my own taste, or which, […]

What o’clock is it? — Old Saying. EVERYBODY knows, in a general way, that the finest place in the world is — or, alas, was — the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss. Yet as it lies some distance from any of the main roads, being in a somewhat out-of-the-way situation, there are perhaps very few of […]

——– all people went Upon their ten toes in wild wonderment. — Bishop Hall’s Satires. I AM – that is to say I was – a great man; but I am neither the author of Junius nor the man in the mask; for my name, I believe, is Robert Jones, and I was born somewhere […]

Of all who hail thy presence as the morning —Of all to whom thine absence is the night —The blotting utterly from out high heavenThe sacred sun — of all who, weeping, bless theeHourly for hope- for life — ah! above all,For the resurrection of deep-buried faithIn Truth — in Virtue — in Humanity —Of […]

Truth is stranger than fiction. OLD SAYING. HAVING had occasion, lately, in the course of some Oriental investigations, to consult the Tellmenow Isitsoornot, a work which (like the Zohar of Simeon Jochaides) is scarcely known at all, even in Europe; and which has never been quoted, to my knowledge, by any American — if we […]

The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways ; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus. Joseph Glanville. . WE had now reached the summit […]