“Enough of this:”  1828 has nearly got the “go-by” and we have outlived its pains and perils, its varied scenes of good or evil, and its pleasures too, for there is a bright side to human reverse and suffering, and we are ready at our posts to enact and stand another campaign in this “strange eventful history.”  We often find that the public discover virtues and good qualities in a man after his death, which they had previously given him no credit for; let this be as it may, 1828 may be deemed a very “passable” year.  To use a simile, a sick man when recovering from a fever, makes slow progress at first; and we should fairly hope that the gallant ship is at last weathering the hurricane of the “commercial crisis,” and that the trade-winds of prosperity will again visit us and extend their balmy influence over our shores; and to borrow a commercial phrase, we trust to be able to quote an improvement on this head next year.

  I stood between the meeting years
    The coming and the past,
  And I ask’d of the future one
    Wilt thou be like the last? 
  The same in many a sleepless night,
    In many an anxious day? 
  Thank heaven!  I have no prophet’s eye,
    To look upon thy way!

L.E.L.

The march of mind is progressing, and the once boasted “wisdom of our ancestors” and the “golden days of good Queen Bess,” are hurled with derision to the tomb of all the Capulets.  We regret that we cannot chronicle a “Narrative of a first attempt to reach the cities of Bath and Bristol, in the year 1828, in an extra patent steam-coach, by Messrs. Burstall, or Gurney.”  The newspapers, however, still continue to inform us that such vehicles are about to start, so we may reasonably expect that Time will accomplish the long talked of event.  Nay, we even hear it rumoured that the public are shortly to crest the billows in a steamer at the rate of fifty or a hundred miles an hour! and this is mentioned as a mere first essay, an immature sample of what the improved steam-paddles are to effect—­also in Time; who after this can doubt the approaching perfectibility of Mars?  Oh, steam! steam! but this is well ploughed ground.

Art, science, and literature, also progress, and we almost begin to fear we shall soon be puzzled where to stow the books, and anticipate a dearth in rags, an extinction of Rag-Fair! (which will keep the others in countenance,) the booksellers’ maws seem so capacious.  Christmas with its rare recollections of feasting (and their pendant of bile and sick headache) has again come round.  New Year’s Day, and of all the days most “rich and rare,” Twelfth Day is coming!  But it is in Scotland that the advent of the new year, or Hogmanay is kept with the most hilarity; the Scotch by their extra rejoicings at this time, seem to wish to make up for their utter neglect of Christmas.  We may be induced to offer a few reminiscences of a sojourn in the north, at this period, on a future occasion.  The extreme beauty of the following lines on the year that is past, will, we think, prove a sufficient apology for their introduction here:—­