Like an antelope in the wilderness—­or swan on the river—­or eagle in the sky.  Dream that she is dead, and oh! what a world!  Yet die she must some day—­so must the moon and stars.  Meanwhile there is a blessing in prayers—­and hark! how the nations cry, “Oh!  Maga, live for ever!”

We often pity our poor ancestors.  How they contrived to make the ends meet, surpasses our conjectural powers.  What a weary waste must have seemed expanding before their eyes, between morning and night!  Don’t tell us that the human female never longs for other pastime than

  “To suckle fools and chronicle small beer.”

True, ladies sighed not then for periodicals—­but there, in the depths of their ignorance, lay their utter wretchedness.  What! keep pickling and preserving during the whole mortal life of an immortal being!  Except when at jelly, everlastingly at jam!  The soul sickens at the monotonous sweetness of such a wersh existence.  True that many sat all life-long at needlework; but is not that a very sew-sew sort of life?  Then oh! the miserable males!  We speak of times after the invention, it is true, of printing—­but who read what were called books then?  Books! no more like our periodicals, than dry, rotten, worm-eaten, fungous logs are like green living leafy trees, laden with dews, bees, and birds, in the musical sunshine.  What could males do then but yawn, sleep, snore, guzzle, guttle, and drink till they grew dead and got buried?  Fox-hunting won’t always do—­and often it is not to be had; who can be happy with his gun through good report and bad report in an a’ day’s rain?  Small amusement in fishing in muddy water; palls upon the sense quarrelling with neighbours on points of etiquette and the disputed property of hedgerow trees; a fever in the family ceases to raise the pulse of any inmate, except the patient; death itself is no relief to the dulness; a funeral is little better; the yawn of the grave seems a sort of unhallowed mockery; the scutcheon hung out on the front of the old dismal hall, is like a sign on a deserted Spittal; along with sables is worn a suitable stupidity by all the sad survivors.—­And such, before the era of Periodicals, such was the life in—­merry England.  Oh! dear!—­oh! dear me!

We shall not enter into any historical details—­for this is not a Monologue for the Quarterly—­but we simply assert, that in the times we allude to (don’t mention dates) there was little or no reading in England.  There was neither the Reading Fly nor the Reading Public.  What could this be owing to, but the non-existence of Periodicals?  What elderly-young lady could be expected to turn from house affairs, for example, to Spenser’s Fairy Queen?  It is a long, long, long poem, that Fairy Queen of Spenser’s; nobody, of course, ever dreamt of getting through it; but though you may have given up all hope of getting through a poem or a wood, you expect to be able to find your way back again to the spot where you unluckily