man,

ON RISING WITH THE LARK.

Ar what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his nightgear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalists enough to determine. But, for a mere human gentlethat has no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed to such preposterous exercises, we take ten or half after ten (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice) to be the very earliest hour at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires another half-hour's good consideration.

Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gauds, abroad in the world, in summer-time especially, some hours before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getting up. But, having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the Sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the Sun, (as 't is called,) to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller.

We deny not that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world; to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale, we choose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness; to shape and mould them.

Some people have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders,

ON RISING WITH THE LARK.

51

they gulp them too grossly to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into daylight a struggling and half-vanishing nightmare; to handle and examine the terrors, or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these spiritual communications to let them go so lightly. We are not so stupid or so careless as that Imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as much significance as our waking concerns; or rather to import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the shadowy world whither we are hastening.

We have shaken hands with the world's business; we have done with it; we have discharged ourself of it. Why should we get up? we have neither suit to solicit nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth Act. We have nothing here to expect, but in a short time a sick-bed, and a dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords.

are already half-acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in the world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed grey before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are composed. We have asked no more of life than what the mimic images in play-houses present us with. Even those types have waxed fainter. Our clock appears

to have struck. We are SUPERANNUATED.

In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to have friends at Court. The abstracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little of the usages of that colony; to learn the language, and the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world; and think we know already how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us have become familiar. We feel attenuated into their meagre essences, and have

given the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal being. We once thought life to be something; but it has unaccountably fallen from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions. The Sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get up?

CHARLES LAMB: 1775-1834.

BOOKS AND READING.

READER, my compliments to you!

This is a form of courtesy which the Turks use in their compositions; and, being so courteous a form, I have here adopted it. Why not? Turks though they are, we learnt inoculation from them, and the use of coffee; and hitherto we have taught them nothing but the use of tobacco in return.

Reader, my compliments to you!

Why is it that we hear no more of Gentle Readers? Is it that, having become critical in this age of Magazines and Reviews, they have ceased to be gentle ?

All Readers however, thank Heaven, and what is left among us of that best and rarest of all senses called Common Sense, all Readers however are not critical. There are still some who are willing to be pleased, and thankful for being pleased; and who do not think it necessary that they should be able to parse their pleasure, like a lesson, and give a rule or a reason why they are pleased, or why they ought not to be pleased. There are still readers who have never read an Essay upon Taste; and if they take my advice they never will; for they can no more improve their taste by so doing, than they could improve their appetite or their digestion by studying a cookery-book.

I have something to say to all classes of Readers; and therefore, having thus begun to speak of one, with that class I will proceed. It is to the youthful part of my lectors, (why not lectors as well as auditors?) that I now address myself. Young Readers, you whose hearts are open, whose understandings are not yet hardened, and whose feelings are neither exhausted nor incrusted by the world, take from me a better rule than any professors of criticism will teach you.

Would you know whether the tendency of a book is good or

evil, examine in what state of mind you lay it down. Has it in duced you to suspect that what you have been accustomed to think unlawful may after all be innocent, and that that may be harmless which you have hitherto been taught to think dangerous? Has it tended to make you dissatisfied and impatient under the control of others; and disposed you to relax in that self-government without which both the laws of God and man tell us there can be no virtue, and consequently no happiness? Has it attempted to abate your admiration and reverence for what is great and good, and to diminish in you the love of your country and your fellow-creatures? Has it addressed itself to your pride, your vanity, your selfishness, or any other of your evil propensities? Has it defiled the imagination with what is loathsome, and shocked the heart with what is monstrous? Has it disturbed the sense of right and wrong which the Creator has implanted in the human soul? If so, if you are conscious of all or any of these effects, or if, having escaped from all, you have felt that such were the effects it was intended to produce, throw the book in the fire, whatever name it may bear in the title-page! Throw it in the fire, young man, though it should have been the gift of a friend! - young lady, away with the whole set, though it should be the prominent furniture of a rosewood bookcase!

ROBERT SOUTHEY: 1774-1843.

OF STUDIES.

STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business for expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs come best from those that are learned.

To spend too much time in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humour of a scholar: they perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

8

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are, like common distilled waters, flashy things.

Reading maketh a full man, conference1 a ready man, and writing an exact man; and therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend: Abeunt studia in mores: nay, there is no stand or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies: like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises, bowling is good for the stone and reins, shooting for the lungs and breast, gentle walking for the stomach, riding for the head and the like.

So, if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again if his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen; for they are Cymini sectores :a

:

7 Simple, in old language, often means ignorant or foolish.

8 Curiously in the sense of attentively or inquisitively.

9 In Bacon's time, the auxiliaries could, should, and would were often used indiscriminately. Here we should use should.

1 Conference for conversation. So, a little further on, confer for converse.

2 In our old writers, wit is very often put for mind, judgment, understanding. Here, and throughout this piece, it is mind.

3 "Studies pass up into manners and habits."

4 "Splitters of cummin," or, as we now say, "hair-splitters." "The schoolmen " are the scholars of the Middle Ages, who spent their force very much in drawing nice and frivolous distinctions; or in splitting hairs.