Huddersfield.  S.J.

* * * * *

ANTICIPATION.

(For the Mirror.)

  ’Twixt the appointment and the day
  Ages seem to roll away—­
  Lingering doubts and cares arise,
  Fancy glows with sweet surmise;
  Now a hope—­and now a fear,
  First a smile—­and then a tear;
  But that day may never come,
  Death may seal thine earthly doom. 
  Or that day may prove unkind,
  Thine anticipation blind! 
  The best pleasure thou wilt know
  May be to brood upon thy woe: 
  Wailing happy days gone by,
  When fancied pleasures mock’d thine eye: 
  Days that never shall return. 
  Mortal, then, this lesson learn—­
  Struggle not against thy fate,
  For thy last day hath its date! 
  It is written in the skies,
  And a guardian angel cries,
  Dream no more of earthly joys,
  They are fleeting, fickle toys.

CYMBELINE.

* * * * *

THE TOPOGRAPHER

* * * * *

ROAD BOOK OF SCOTLAND.

Tourists will never cease to remember their obligations to Mr. Leigh, the publisher of this pretty little volume.  He has done so much for their gratification in his New Pocket Road Books, (of which series the present work is one,) that their success ought to be toasted in all the delightful retreats to which they act as ciceroni.  In his Road Book of England and Wales, he has done what Mr. Peel is now doing with our old Acts of Parliament—­consolidating their worth, and rejecting their obsoleteness.  For our own part, one of the greatest bugbears of books is the Road Book on the old system:  it is all long columns of small type, in which we lose our way as in the cross-roads of the last century—­all direction-posts and “Vides,” puzzle upon puzzle, Pelion on Ossa, and Ossa on Pelion—­crabbed and complex abbreviations, with which we get acquainted at the end of our journey.  They contain nothing like direct information, and the only people who appear to understand them are postmasters and innkeepers, and some old-established bagmen, whose interests and heads will give you a clearer view of the roads than all the itineraries ever printed.  It was, however, but reasonable to expect that the Macadamization of roads, or the mending of ways, should be followed up by the improvement of Road Books, since greater facilities and inducements were thereby afforded to the tourist for the detection and exposure of blunders—­such as placing a hall on the wrong side of the road, or recording some relic which had never existed but in the book.