Breathless she gaz'd through the woodland so dreary,
Slowly approaching, a warrior was seen;
Life's ebbing tide mark'd his footstep so weary,
Cleft was his helmet, and woe was his mien.
"Save thee, fair maid, for our armies are flying;
Save thee, fair maid, for thy guardian is low;
Cold on yon heath thy bold Frederick is lying,
Fast through the woodland approaches the foe."
Two of the best stories are The Bride, by Theodore Hook, and the Shooting Star, an Irish tale, by Lord Nugent; and a Dialogue for the year 2310, by the author of Granby, has considerable smartness. The scene is in London, where one of the speakers has just arrived "from out of Scotland; breakfasted this morning at Edinburgh, and have not been in town above a couple of hours. The roads are dreadfully heavy now: conceive my having been seven hours and a half coming from Edinburgh to London." Killing between four and five thousand head of game in one day is shooting ill; and one of the party has a gun which would give twenty-seven discharges in a minute, and mine would give only twenty-five. I really must change my maker. Have you seen the last new invention, the hydro-potassian lock?" Hunting machines, that would fly like balloons over a ten-foot wall—A candidate for the Circumnavigation Club, who has been four times round the world in his own, yacht—A point of bad taste to make a morning call by daylight—Dining at twelve P.M.—A spring-door with a self-acting knocker, which gives a treble knock, and is opened by a steam porter in livery—A chair mounting from the hall, through the ceiling, into the drawing room—Talking to a lady two miles off through a telescope, till one's fingers ache—A callisthenic academy for the children of pauper operatives—An automaton note-writer—A lady professing ignorance of Almack's, "a club where Swift and Johnson used to meet, but I don't profess to be an antiquarian"—"Love and Algebra," one of the common scientific novels thumbed by coal-heavers and orange-women, very well for the common people—Every thing is taught them now by means of scientific novels: such as "Geological Atoms, or the Adventures of a Dustman"—Doubted very much whether English wheat is fit for any thing but the brute creation—Dark times of the 19th century—Six-hourly and half-daily newspapers—"apropos, as the hackney-coachmen say"—Turkey, one of the southern provinces of Russia—His Majesty Jonathan III. of Washington—The Emperor of India—The Burmese Republic—English the language of three-fourths of Asia, nine-tenths of North America, half Africa, and all the insular states in the South Seas—and England, that little kingdom, with a population of not more than forty millions, has had the honour of colonizing half the globe; but "these countries are our colonies no longer." Such are a few of the wonders of 2130! In the Dialogue is an admirable joke with a scientific street-sweeper and a learned beggar, who pleads necessitas non habet legem, and "embraces the profession of an operative mendicant." But here is a morceau:
Lady D.—Ah! Lord A.! Mr. C.! most unexpected persons both! I heard only yesterday that one of you was in Greenland, and the other in Africa. What false reports they circulate!