Juba! but do n't do it again my good fellow! I have one ache still left in each particular joint of my body at the bare recollection of that vile animal!'

—Now JOHN WATERS!' I think I hear our grave EDITOR say, 'will you give me leave to ask you, and this with some touch of the fervour of your late horse-owner, what possible relation this rigmarole story of yours may by any means have with the subject, in the discussion of which according to your motto you had engaged your pen and my Magazine?'

Venerable Father KNICK.! none on Earth. Not the remotest relation in life with the motto of the Essay, but closely with the number thereof. If you take the trouble to consult the heading you will find that in my enthusiastick desire to aid the community in ridding itself of these atrocious beards, I was so injudicious as to number my Essays; and the necessity of furnishing the Number THREE for this month reminded me of this imperative morning ride.

I do not comprehend either why an Essayist should be more strictly than a Reviewer confined to his subject. The latter we all know in some of his most admired achievements sets up at the head of a chapter the title-page of some work he professes to criticize; and using it as a starting-post, turns his back, mounts his horse and darts from it at full speed, and never pauses before it again until brought round at the end of a four-mile heat; when he alights, makes a quotation, is weighed, and disappears.

This obviously as you perceive brings me to the consideration of the Saucer or the Trencher Beard, to which I had the honour to allude at the close of my last number of this very prolonged Essay.

The Saucer or Trencher Beard then is affected and cultivated mainly by those to whom nature hath denied a growth of hair upon the cheek the lip and upper part of the chin; and often in these instances it renders the appearance of the wearer eminently vulgar and grotesque.

I have before me in my mind's Eye while I write, a short stout thickset clumsily-built man with hardly any neck, who cherishes a broad layer of black hair from the deep throat to the chin as a cushion for his jaws to repose upon. He has neither moustache nor whisker. The hair of his head is of a sandy brown and is made to hang in long loose dishevelled masses down his head and one side of his face, and is endeavored to be controulled behind the ear, where its ends mingle with the back outskirts of this trencher beard.

The Eyes are made of cairn-goram the Scotch pebble of that name. The sight is slightly oblique, and the brows are dark like the beard. Large full unhealthy cheeks of an opalescent hue indicate personal confinement or want of exercise and complete the head. The effect, when seen in the distance, of this strong contrast between the complexion and the black isolated undergrowth of hair seen like a streak beneath it, is to sever the head from the body; and the spectator beholds in front a head of John the Baptist brought before Herod in a black charger.

There is nothing indeed to represent the blood of the Decapitation unless you adopt in its stead the small streams of Tobacco-juice which

from excessive and wholly misplaced gesticulation and oratorical attempt are made to ooze out of the corners of the subject's mouth.

This is a trencher, or a saucer beard! It is that of a publick speaker; whose appearance beyond that of other men ought to be marked in every respect by the nicest possible rules of propriety, neatness, decorum, elegance, and grace. To your Tents, O ISRAEL!

It is while closing this number of the Essay that we have had the satisfaction to learn through the interesting columns of The Tribune, for which the Proclamation has been translated, that His Majesty the Emperour of all the Russias has turned His gracious attention to this growing Enormity of Beards; which will in future throughout His vast dominions and in Poland be confined in its 'detestable usage' to the serfs and mancipia and gross wretches of the lowest class, to whom and to whose Fathers the luxury of lather has ever been unknown and unimaginable from the days of NOAH; and we intreat that a copy of the Proclamation may be forthwith appended hereto. May the gracious shadow of HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY never be less!

JOHN WATERS.

We find in 'La Voix du Peuple' a copy of a Proclamation from the Civil Governor of Warsaw which we translate for 'The Tribune' as a literary curiosity:

TO THE MILITARY PREFECT OF:

HIS MAJESTY the Emperour of all the Russias having graciously turned his attention to an unfortunate habit which has begun to prevail among the nobility of his empire, namely, the habit of allowing the beard to grow, has deigned to order all his noble subjects to abstain from that impropriety. "The Council of Administration of the Kingdom of Poland, His Highness the Prince Lieutenant presiding, after having maturely deliberated on this affair, have declared that the same disposition ought to be applied to the nobility of the Kingdom of Poland.

HIS MAJESTY having permitted the Russian nobility to wear uniform, a privilege which he has graciously extended to the Polish nobility, it is evident that the beard, being incompatible with the uniform in Russia, cannot be tolerated in Poland.

In consequence of this decision, which has been communicated to me by His Excellency the Minister of Home Affairs, I call upon the Military Prefects to take prompt and efficacious measures to the end that the detestable usage of wearing beards may be repressed, and that the inhabitants abandon this indecent and subversive innovation.

"If, contrary to every expectation, any persons should dare to not conform with this law, I call upon the Military Prefect to inform them of the unhappy consequences which will not fail to overtake them, and I formally order him to send me immediately a list of the disobedient, to be submitted to His Highness the Prince Lieutenant, who will decide upon their fate.

The Military Prefect will address to me his report on this subject within eight days at the farthest.

ON many funereal monuments of the ancients Death is represented as a beautiful youth, leaning upon an inverted torch, in an attitude of repose, his wings folded and his feet crossed.'

'How beautiful is Death - Death and his brother, Sleep!-SHELLEY.

THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES LAMB.*

BY 7. W

SHELTON.

ANTAGONISM is the strange charm which endears Lamb's writings. Not that he carried this to perverseness or violence, nor yet beyond the bounds of mere originality. He was unlike; but more than this he repelled. Hence he is a contradiction, for his humanity is a proverb. The tenderness of a boy's heart went with him to the tomb. In his opposition he never wrote a line which merited a malignant return, He was an enemy to be loved; a fault-finder whose poutings were agrecable; in short, an enigma which needs to be unravelled. It is hard to analyze. We know if we are charmed; if the landscape pleases us; if the picture has prevailed with our untutored fancy; if the beauty we gaze on has inspired us with her love; but it is altogether by a something, we know not what. Blessed be our kindly natures! we are pleased first, and inquire the reasons afterward. Let us see if we can reconcile Lamb with himself; if we can interpret the religion of his nature by those writings wherein his heart is embalmed. The circle of his admirers has ever been rather choice than large. It is certain that he selected few friends, chosen for individuality, strong antagonizers. Such as they were, they were not easily found, or soon parted with. Death alone broke up the little company. He set out with Coleridge. Torn away, in course of time, from this good man, he lost the half of his soul. He had disabilities without and within which forbade to throw himself into the bold, arduous struggle of life. The very intercourse of men would have been the rude, sweeping demolition of much that was fine in his character. He was not in contact with the general world; was opposed to their systems; courted not the favor of their good people.' They made no concessions to him; why should he to them? He passed with one faction for a free-thinker, with another for a bigot; but most did not understand him.

It was the same with his friends the books. Few and rare were his 'midnight darlings,' his folios. Milton or Shakspeare he loved; they had grand names; but those which sounded sweetest to him, and carried a perfume in the mention, were Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.' The art of reviewing, so verbose and so nugatory, had as little to do in governing his preconceived affection as with the final destiny of the books. It mattered not from what royal presses they came, cum privilegio. They had their own Imprimatur (those which charmed him most), a something unseen or disregarded by the common eye. What he says on book-borrowers

*THIS essay was published some years ago, but with so many errors of printing as materially to mar, and in some cases to destroy the sense. If you will republish it as now corrected, you will do an act of justice to the affection which is borne by the writer and others to the memory of one whose praises cannot be too often repeated the amiable man, the exquisite essayist, CHARLES LAME.

NOTE TO THE EDITOR.

discloses his taste: That slight vacuum in the left-hand case, scarcely, distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser, was whilom the commodious resting-place of Brown on Urn Burial;' here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy,' in sober state; there loitered the Complete Angler,' quiet as life, by some stream-side; in yonder nook 'John Buncle,' a widower volume, with eyes closed,' mourns his ravished mate.' The current literature, which pleased the million quite well, passed him by almost unheeded. The volumes of the greatest novelist of the age were to him wearisome in the extreme. Let them sway others with a dictator's mastery; he was not so constituted. He would rather have been found with that party of simple folks who are said to have read Sir Charles Grandison by slow stages, with a 'realizing sense' (as a boy-Crusoe), following him through with overwrought anxiety, and at the conclusion of the history had the village-bells rung for joy. The delicacies which he affected would be quite imperceptible to a rough palate. They were called from some ultimate realm, where they grew up from among the dust of forgetfulness, and after he had served them up in a style incomparably gracious, they were to the liking only of the most judicious epicure. He was, moreover, repugnant to the spirit of the present age. It was bitter cold and stonyhearted; rushed on in the breathless race, and cast back no parting looks. To him the whole past was as a well-stored church-yard, where he rambled reverentially with the dead, and deprecated violence with the pathetic words of Shakspeare over his sepulchre. The past indeed was a part of his present, brought near to him by many chords, and laid hold of by his fine sympathy. While others would bury that which had been, without any tearfulness, he could not see the time-honored relic pass away, and be consoled with any hope of better; he drew near to the grave of departed custom and wept-quàm familiariter !

In his conversation he opposed even his beloved friends, so curiously that it might seem merriment. It was in accord with his character. Those who were allied to him could penetrate his meaning; why he should rejoin to the obvious, why parry that which resembled a truism, why set up a beautiful true standard to cast it down by a single breath of sarcasm. As to the opinions of most men, the mere actors on the theatre of common life, he did not agree with them. He closed his ears with the desperation of the 'enraged musician.' He did not modulate his temper to any of their 'soft recorders;' their best agreements sounded harsh and wrangling; chorus, strophe and antistrophe were alike displeasing; and the full, consentient voices of men, on many subjects, struck his peculiar nerves like the first preparement of an orchestra. He understood them no better than he did the music of the day, the operatic flourishes, the long prolusions of our best masters, to which rebellion amounted to rank treason; his guilt was equal to stratagems and spoils.' Yes, he was positively averse to professed music; and this antipathy was remarkable for one whose tastes were so delicate; who so loved to 'gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to adorn the rose.' He made 'MELODY in his heart.'

As to his writings, which are a true transcript of his nature, they consist almost entirely of a parcel of ingenious paradoxes, the idea of