Why will so many myriads of men and women, denied by nature "the vision and the faculty divine," persist in the delusion that they are poetising, while they are but versifying "this bright and breathing world?" They see truly not even the outward objects of sight. But of all the rare affinities and relationships in Nature, visible or audible to Fine-ear-and-Far-eye the Poet, not a whisper--not a glimpse have they ever heard or seen, any more than had they been born deaf-blind.

They paint a landscape, but nothing "prates of their whereabouts," while they were sitting on a tripod, with their paper on their knees, drawing--their breath. For, in the front ground is a castle, against which, if you offer to stir a step, you infallibly break your head, unless providentially stopped by that extraordinary vegetable-looking substance, perhaps a tree, growing bolt upright out of an intermediate stone, that has wedged itself in long after there had ceased to be even standing-room in that strange theatre of nature. But down from "the swelling instep of a mountain's foot," that has protruded itself through a wood, while the body of the mountain prudently remains in the extreme distance, descends on you, ere you have recovered from your unexpected encounter with the old Roman cement, an unconscionable cataract. There stands a deer or goat, or rather some beast with horns, "strictly anonymous," placed for effect, contrary to all cause, in a place where it seems as uncertain how he got in as it is certain that he never can get out till he becomes a hippogriff.

The true poet, again, has such potent eyes, that when he lets down the lids, he sees just as well, perhaps better than when they were up; for in that deep, earnest, inward gaze, the fluctuating sea of scenery subsides into a settled calm, where all is harmony as well as beauty--order as well as peace. What though he have been fated, through youth and manhood, to dwell in city smoke? His childhood--his boyhood--were overhung with trees, and through its heart went the murmur of waters. Then it is, we verily believe, that in all poets, is filled with images up to the brim, Imagination's treasury. Genius, growing, and grown up to maturity, is still a prodigal. But he draws on the Bank of Youth. His bills, whether at a short or long date, are never dishonoured; nay, made payable at sight, they are as good as gold. Nor cares that Bank for a run, made even in a panic, for besides bars and billets, and wedges and blocks of gold, there are, unappreciable beyond the riches which against a time of trouble

"The Sultaun hides in his ancestral tombs,"

jewels and diamonds sufficient

"To ransom great kings from captivity."

We sometimes think that the power of painting Nature to the life, whether in her real or ideal beauty (both belong to _life_,) is seldom evolved to its utmost, until the mind possessing it is withdrawn in the body from all rural _environment_. It has not been so with Wordsworth, but it was so with Milton. The descriptive poetry in "Comus" is indeed rich as rich may be, but certainly not so great, perhaps not so beautiful, as that in "Paradise Lost."

It would seem to be so with all of us, small as well as great; and were _we_--Christopher North--to compose a poem on Loch Skene, two thousand feet or so above the level of the sea, and some miles from a house, we should desire to do so in a metropolitan cellar. Desire springs from separation. The spirit seeks to unite itself to the beauty it loves, the grandeur it admires, the sublimity it almost fears; and all these being o'er the hills and far away, or on the hills cloud-hidden, why it--the spirit--makes itself wings--or rather wings grow up of themselves in its passion, and naturewards it flies like a dove or an eagle. People looking at us believe us present, but they never were so far mistaken in their lives; for in the Seamew are we sailing with the tide through the moonshine on Loch Etive--or hanging o'er that gulf of peril on the bosom of Skyroura.

We are sitting now in a dusky den--with our eyes shut--but we see the whole Highlands. Our Highland Mountains are of the best possible magnitude--ranging between two and four thousand feet high--and then in what multitudes! The more familiar you become with them, the mightier they appear--and you feel that it is all sheer folly to seek to dwindle or dwarf them, by comparing them as they rise before your eyes with your imagination of Mont Blanc and those eternal glaciers. If you can bring them under your command, you are indeed a sovereign--and have a noble set of subjects. In some weather they are of any height you choose to put them--say thirty thousand feet--in other states of the atmosphere you think you could walk over their summits and down into the region beyond in an hour. Try. We have seen Cruachan, during a whole black day, swollen into such enormous bulk, that Loch Awe looked like but a sullen river at his base, her woods bushes, and Kilchurn no bigger than a cottage. The whole visible scene was but he and his shadow. They seemed to make the day black, rather than the day to make them so--and at nightfall he took wider and loftier possession of the sky--the clouds congregated round without hiding his summit, on which seemed to twinkle, like earth-lighted fires, a few uncertain stars. Rain drives you into a shieling--and you sit there for an hour or two in eloquent confabulation with the herdsman, your English against his Gaelic. Out of the door you creep--and gaze in astonishment on a new world. The mist is slowly rolling up and away in long lines of clouds, preserving, perhaps, a beautiful regularity on their ascension and evanescence, and between them

"Tier above tier, a wooded theatre Of stateliest view,"

or cliff galleries with strange stone-images sitting up aloft; and yet your eyes have not reached the summits, nor will they reach them, till all that vapoury ten-mile-long mass dissolve, or be scattered, and then you start to see them, as if therein had been but their bases, THE MOUNTAINS, with here and there a peak illumined, reposing in the blue serene that smiles as if all the while it had been above reach of the storm.

The power of Egoism accompanies us into solitude; nay, is even more life-pervading there than in the hum of men. There the stocks and stones are more impressible than those we sometimes stumble on in human society, and, moulded at our will, take what shape we choose to give them; the trees follow our footsteps, though our lips be mute, and we may have left at home our fiddle--more potent we in our actuality than the fabled Orpheus. Be hushed, ye streams, and listen unto Christopher!

Be chained, ye clouds, and attentive unto North! And at our bidding silent the cataract on the cliff--the thunder on the sky. The sea beholds us on the shore--and his one huge frown transformed into a multitudinous smile, he turns flowing affections towards us along the golden sands--and in a fluctuating hindrance of lovely foam-wreaths envelopes our feet!

To return to Thomson. Wordsworth labours to prove, in one of his "postliminious prefaces," that the true spirit of "The Seasons," till long after their publication, was neither felt nor understood. In the conduct of his argument he does not shine. That the poem was at once admired he is forced to admit; but then, according to him, the admiration was false and hollow--it was regarded but with that wonder which is the "natural product of ignorance." After having observed that, excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and "The Seasons" does not contain a single new image of external nature, he proceeds to call the once well-known verses of Dryden in the "Indian Emperor," descriptive of the hush of night, "vague, bombastic, and senseless," and Pope's celebrated translation of the moonlight scene in the "Iliad," altogether "absurd,"--and then, without ever once dreaming of any necessity of showing them to be so, or even, if he had succeeded in doing so, of the utter illogicality of any argument drawn from their failure to establish the point he is hammering at, he all at once says, with the most astounding assumption, "_having shown_ that much of what his [Thomson's] biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment--how is the rest to be accounted for?"

_"Having shown"!!!_ Why, he has shown nothing but his own arrogance in supposing that his mere _ipse dixit_ will be taken by the whole world as proof that Dryden and Pope had not the use of their eyes. "Strange to think of an enthusiast," he says (alluding to the passage in Pope's translation of the "Iliad"), "as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their _absurdity_!" We are no enthusiasts--we are far too old for that folly; but we have eyes in our head, though sometimes rather dim and motey, and as good eyes, too, as Mr Wordsworth, and we often have recited--and hope often will recite them again--Pope's exquisite lines, not only without any "suspicion of their absurdity," but with the conviction of a most devout belief that, with some little vagueness perhaps, and repetition, and a word here and there that might be altered for the better, the description is most beautiful. But grant it miserable--grant all Mr Wordsworth has so dictatorially uttered--and what then? Though descriptive poetry did not flourish during the period between "Paradise Lost" and "The Seasons," nevertheless, did not mankind enjoy the use of their seven senses? Could they not see and hear without the aid of those oculists and aurists, the poets? Were all the shepherds and agriculturists of England and Scotland blind and deaf to all the sights and sounds of nature, and all the gentlemen and ladies too, from the king and queen upon the throne, to the lowest of their subjects? Very like a whale! Causes there were why poetry flowed during that era in another channel than that of the description of natural scenery; and if it flowed too little in that channel then--which is true--equally is it true that it flows now in it too much--especially among the poets of the Lake School, to the neglect, not of sentiments and affections--for there they excel--but of strong direct human passion applied to the stir and tumult--of which the interest is profound and eternal--of all the great affairs of human life. But though the descriptive poets during the period between Milton and Thomson were few and indifferent, no reason is there in this world for imagining, with Mr Wordsworth, that men had forgotten both the heavens and the earth. They had not--nor was the wonder with which they must have regarded the great shows of nature, the "natural product of ignorance," then, any more than it is now, or ever was during a civilised age. If we be right in saying so--then neither could the admiration which "The Seasons," on the first appearance of that glorious poem, excited, be said, with any truth, to have been but a "wonder, the natural product of ignorance."

Mr Wordsworth having thus signally failed in his attempt to show that "much of what Thomson's biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment," let us accompany him in his equally futile efforts to show "how the rest is to be accounted for." He attempts to do so after this fashion: "Thomson was fortunate in the very title of his poem, which seemed to bring it home to the prepared sympathies of every one; in the next place, notwithstanding his high powers, he writes a vicious style; and his false ornaments are exactly of that kind which would be most likely to strike the undiscerning. He likewise abounds with sentimental commonplaces, that, from the manner in which they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. In any well-used copy of 'The Seasons,' the book generally opens of itself with the Rhapsody on Love, or with one of the stories, perhaps of Damon and Musidora. These also are prominent in our Collections of Extracts, and are the parts of his work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."

Thomson, in one sense, _was fortunate_ in the _title_ of his poem. But a great poet like Wordsworth might--nay, ought to have chosen another word--or have given of that word a loftier explanation, when applied to Thomson's _choice_ of the Seasons for the subject of his immortal poem.

Genius made that choice--not fortune. The "Seasons" are not merely the "_title_" of his poem--they are his poem, and his poem is the Seasons.

But how, pray, can Thomson be said to have been _fortunate_ in the _title_ or the subject either of his poem, in the sense that Mr Wordsworth means? Why, according to him, people knew little, and cared less, about the Seasons. "The art of seeing had in some measure been learned!" That he allows--but that was all--and that all is but little--and surely far from being enough to have disposed people in general to listen to the strains of a poet who painted nature in all her moods, and under all her aspects. Thomson, then, we say, was either most _unfortunate_ in the title of his poem, or there was not with the many that indifference to, and ignorance of natural scenery, on which Mr Wordsworth so strenuously insists as part, or rather whole, of his preceding argument.

The title, Mr Wordsworth says, seemed "to bring the poem home to the _prepared sympathies_ of every one!" What! to the prepared sympathies of those who had merely, in some measure, learned the "art of seeing," and who had "paid," as he says in another sentence, "little accurate attention to the appearances of nature!" Never did the weakest mind ever fall into grosser contradictions than does here one of the strongest, in vainly labouring to bolster up a silly assertion, which he has desperately ventured on from a most mistaken conceit that it was necessary to account for the kind of reception which his own poetry had met with from the present age. The truth is, that had Mr Wordsworth known, when he indited these luckless and helpless sentences, that his own poetry was, in the best sense of the word, a thousand times more popular than he supposed it to be--and Heaven be praised, for the honour of the age, it was and is so!--never had they been written, nor had he here and elsewhere laboured to prove that in proportion as poetry is bad, or rather as it is no poetry at all, is it, has been, and always will be, more and more popular in the age contemporary with the writer.

That Thomson, in "The Seasons," _sometimes_ writes a _vicious style_, may be true; but it is not true that he _often_ does so. His style has its faults, no doubt, and some of them inextricably interwoven with the web of his composition. It is a dangerous style to imitate--especially to dunces. But its _virtue is divine_; and that _divine virtue_, even in this low world of ours, wins admiration more surely and widely than _earthly vice_--be it in words, thoughts, feelings, or actions--is a creed that we will not relinquish at the beck or bidding even of the great author of "The Excursion."

That many did--do--and will admire the bad or indifferent passages in "The Seasons"--won by their false glitter or commonplace sentimentalism, is no doubt true: but the delight, though as intense as perhaps it may be foolish, with which boys and virgins, woman-mantuamakers and man-milliners, and "the rest," peruse the Rhapsody on Love--one passage of which we ventured to be facetious on in our Soliloquy on the Seasons--and hang over the picture of Musidora undressing, while Damon watches the process of disrobement, panting behind a tree, will never account for the admiration with which the whole world hailed the "Winter," the first published of "The Seasons;" during which, Thomson had not the barbarity to plunge any young lady naked into the cold bath, nor the ignorance to represent, during such cold weather, any young lady turning her lover sick by the ardour of her looks, and the vehemence of her whole enamoured deportment. The time never was--nor could have been--when such passages were generally esteemed the glory of the poem.

Indeed, independently of its own gross absurdity, the assertion is at total variance with that other assertion, equally absurd, that people admired most in the poem what they least understood; for the Rhapsody on Love is certainly very intelligible, nor does there seem much mystery in Musidora going into the water to wash and cool herself on a hot day. Is it not melancholy, then, to hear such a man as Mr Wordsworth, earnestly, and even somewhat angrily, trying to prove that "these are the parts of the work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice?"

With respect to the "sentimental commonplaces with which Thomson abounds," no doubt they were and are popular; and many of them deserve to be so, for they are on a level with the usual current of human feeling, and many of them are eminently beautiful. Thomson had not the philosophical genius of Wordsworth, but he had a warm human heart, and its generous feelings overflow all his poem. These are not the most poetical parts of "The Seasons," certainly, where such effusions prevail; but still, so far from being either _vicious_ or _worthless_, they have often a virtue and a worth that must be felt by all the children of men. There is something not very credible in the situation of the parties in the story of the "lovely young Lavinia," for example, and much of the sentiment is commonplace enough; but will Mr Wordsworth say--in support of his theory, that the worst poetry is always at first (and at last too, it would seem, from the pleasure with which that tale is still read by all simple minds) the most popular--that that story is a bad one? It is a very beautiful one.

Mr Wordsworth, in all his argumentation, is so blinded by his determination to see everything in but one light, and that a most mistaken one, that he is insensible to the conclusion to which it all leads, or rather, which is involved in it. Why, according to him, _even now_, when people have not only learned the "art of seeing"--a blessing for which they can never be too thankful--but when descriptive poetry has long flourished far beyond its palmiest state in any other era of our literature, still are we poor common mortals who admire "The Seasons," just as deaf and blind now, or nearly so, to their real merits--allowed to be transcendent--as our unhappy forefathers were when that poem first appeared, "a glorious apparition." The Rhapsody on Love, and Damon and Musidora, are still, according to him, its chief attraction--its false ornaments--and its sentimental commonplaces--such as those, we presume, on the benefits of early rising, and,

"Oh! little think the gay licentious proud!"

What a nest of ninnies must people in general be in Mr Wordsworth's eyes! And is "The Excursion" not to be placed by the side of "Paradise Lost," till the Millennium?

Such is the _reasoning (!)_ of one of the first of our English poets, against not only the people of Britain, but mankind. One other sentence there is which we had forgotten--but now remember--which is to help us to distinguish, in the case of the reception "The Seasons" met with, between "wonder and legitimate admiration!" "The subject of the work is the changes produced in the appearances of nature by the revolution of the year; _and, undertaking to write in verse, Thomson pledged himself to treat his subject as became a poet_!" How original and profound!

Thomson redeemed his pledge; and that great pawnbroker, the public, returned to him his poem at the end of a year and a day. Now, what is the "mighty stream of tendency" of that remark? Were the public, or the people, or the world, gulled by this unheard-of pledge of Thomson, to regard his work with that "wonder which is the natural product of ignorance!" If they were so in his case, why not in every other? All poets pledge themselves to be poetical, but too many of them are wretchedly prosaic--die and are buried, or what is worse, protract a miserable existence, in spite of their sentimental commonplaces, false ornaments, and a vicious style. But Thomson, in spite of all these, leapt at once into a glorious life, and a still more glorious immortality.

There is no mystery in the matter. Thomson--a great poet--poured his genius over a subject of universal interest; and "The Seasons" from that hour to this--then, now, and for ever--have been, are, and will be loved, and admired by all the world. All over Scotland "The Seasons" is a household book. Let the taste and feeling shown by the Collectors of Elegant Extracts be poor as possible; yet Thomson's countrymen, high and low, rich and poor, have all along not only gloried in his illustrious fame, but have made a very manual of his great work. It lies in many thousand cottages. We have ourselves seen it in the shepherd's shieling, and in the woodsman's bower--small, yellow-leaved, tatter'd, mean, miserable, calf-skin-bound, smoked, _stinking_ copies--let us not fear to utter the word, ugly but true--yet perused, pored, and pondered over by those humble dwellers, by the winter ingle or on the summer brae, perhaps with as enlightened--certainly with as imagination-overmastering a delight as ever enchained the spirits of the high-born and highly-taught to their splendid copies lying on richly-carved tables, and bound in crimson silk or velvet, in which the genius of painting strives to embody that of poetry, and the printer's art to lend its beauty to the very shape of the words in which the bard's immortal spirit is enshrined. "The art of seeing" has flourished for many centuries in Scotland. Men, women, and children, all look up to her loveful blue or wrathful black skies, with a weather-wisdom that keeps growing from the cradle to the grave. Say not that 'tis alone

"The poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind!"

In Scriptural language, loftier even than that, the same imagery is applied to the sights seen by the true believer. Who is it "that maketh the clouds His chariot?" The Scottish peasantry--Highland and Lowland--look much and often on nature thus; and they live in the heart of the knowledge and of the religion of nature. Therefore do they love Thomson as an inspired bard--only a little lower than the Prophets. In like manner have the people of Scotland--from time immemorial--enjoyed the use of their ears. Even persons somewhat hard of hearing, are not deaf to her waterfalls. In the sublime invocation to Winter, which we have quoted--we hear Thomson recording his own worship of nature in his boyish days, when he roamed among the hills of his father's parish, far away from the manse. In those strange and stormy delights did not thousands of thousands of the Scottish boyhood familiarly live among the mists and snows? Of all that number he alone had the genius to "here eternise on earth" his joy--but many millions have had souls to join religiously in the hymns he chanted. Yea, his native land, with one mighty voice, has for upwards of a century responded,

"These, as they change, Almighty Father, these Are but the varied God!"

THE SNOWBALL BICKER OF PEDMOUNT.

Beautiful as Snow yet is to our eyes, even through our spectacles, how grey it looks beside that which used to come with the long winters that glorified the earth in our youth, till the white lustre was more delightful even than the green--and we prayed that the fine fleecy flakes might never cease falling waveringly from the veil of the sky! No sooner comes the winter now, than it is away again to one of the Poles.

Then, it was a year in itself--a whole life. We remember slides a quarter of a mile long, on level meadows; and some not less steep, down the sides of hills that to us were mountains. No boy can slide on one leg now--not a single shoe seems to have sparables. The florid style of skating shows that that fine art is degenerating; and we look in vain for the grand simplicity of the masters that spread-eagled in the age of its perfection. A change has come over the spirit of the curler's dream.

They seem to our ears indeed to have "quat their roaring play." The cry of "swoop-swoop" is heard still--but a faint, feeble, and unimpassioned cry, compared with that which used, on the Mearns Brother-Loch, to make the welkin ring, and for a moment to startle the moon and stars--those in the sky, as well as those below the ice--till again the tumult subsided--and all the host of heaven above and beneath became serene as a world of dreams. Is it not even so, Shepherd? What is a rink now on a pond in Duddingston policy, to the rinks that rang and roared of old on the Loch o' the Lowes, when every stone circled in a halo of spray, seemed instinct with spirit to obey, along all its flight, the voice of him that launched it on its unerring aim, and sometimes, in spite of his awkward skillessness, when the fate of the game hung on his own single crank, went cannonading through all obstacles, till it fell asleep, like a beauty as it was, just as it kissed the Tee!

Again we see--again we sit in the Snow-house, built by us boys out of a drift in the minister's glebe, a drift--judging by the steeple, which was sixty--about twenty feet high--and purer than any marble. The roof was all strewed with diamonds, which frost saved from the sun. The porch of the palace was pillared--and the character of the building outside was, without any servile imitation--for we worked in the glow of original genius, and none of us had then ever seen itself or its picture--wonderfully like the Parthenon. Entering, you found yourself in a superb hall, lighted up--not with gas, for up to that era gas had not been used except in Pandemonium--but with a vast multitude of farthing candles, each in a turnip stuck into the wall--while a chandelier of frozen snow-branches pendent from the roof set that presence-chamber in a blaze. On a throne at the upper end sat young Christopher North--then the king of boys, as now of men--and proud were his subjects to do him homage. In niches all around the sidewalls were couches covered with hare, rabbit, foumart, and fox's skins--furnished by these animals slain by us in the woods and among the rocks of that sylvan and moorland parish--the regal Torus alone being spread with the dun-deer's hide from Lochiel Forest in Lochaber. Then old airs were sung--in sweet single voice--or in full chorus that startled the wandering night traveller on his way to the lone Kings-well; and then in the intermediate hush, old tales were told "of goblin, ghost, or fairy," or of Wallace Wight at the Barns of Ayr or the Brig o' Stirling--or, a glorious outlaw, harbouring in caves among the Cartlane Craigs--or of Robert Bruce the Deliverer, on his shelty cleaving in twain the skull of Bohun the English knight, on his thundering war-steed, armed cap-a-pie, while the King of Scotland had nothing on his unconquered head but his plain golden crown. Tales of the Snow-house! Had we but the genius to recall you to life in undying song!

Nor was our frozen hall at times uncheered by the smiles of beauty. With those smiles was heard the harmless love-whisper, and the harmless kiss of love; for the cottages poured forth their little lasses in flower-like bands, nor did their parents fear to trust them in the fairy frozen palace, where Christopher was king. Sometimes the old people themselves came to see the wonders of the lamp, and on a snow-table stood a huge bowl--not of snow--steaming with nectar that made Hyems smile as he hung his beard over the fragrant vapour. Nay, the minister himself--with his mother and sister--was with us in our fantastic festivities, and gave to the architecture of our palace his wondering praise. Then Andrew Lyndsey, the blind Paisley musician, a Latin scholar, who knew where Cremona stood, struck up on his famous fiddle jig or strathspey--and the swept floor, in a moment, was alive with a confused flight of foursome reels, each begun and ended with kisses, and maddened by many a whoop and yell--so like savages were we in our glee, dancing at the marriage of some island king!

Countless years have fled since that Snow-palace melted away--and of all who danced there, how many are now alive! Pshaw! as many probably as then danced anywhere else. It would never do to live for ever--let us then live well and wisely; and when death comes--from that sleep how blessed to awake! in a region where is no frost--no snow--but the sun of eternal life.

Mercy on us! what a hubbub!--Can the harriers be hunting in such a snowfall as this, and is poor pussy in view before the whole murderous pack, opening in full cry on her haunches? Why--Imagination, thou art an ass, and thy long ears at all times greedy of deception! 'Tis but a country Schoolhouse pouring forth its long-imprisoned stream of life as in a sudden sunny thaw, the Mad Master flying in the van of his helter-skelter scholars, and the whole yelling mass precipitated, many of them headlong, among the snow. Well do we know the fire-eyed Poet pedagogue, who, more outrageous than Apollo, has "ravished all the Nine." Ode, elegy, epic, tragedy, or farce--all come alike to him; and of all the bards we have ever known--and the sum total cannot be under a thousand--he alone, judging from the cock and the squint of his eye, labours under the blessing or the curse--we wot not whilk it be--of perpetual inspiration. A rare eye, too, is his at the setting of a springe for woodcocks, or tracking a maukin on the snow. Not a daredevil in the school that durst follow the indentations of his toes and fingers up the wall of the old castle, to the holes just below the battlements, to thrust his arm up to the elbows harrying the starlings' nests. The corbies ken the shape of his shoulders, as craftily he threads the wood; and let them build their domicile as high as the swinging twigs will bear its weight, agile as squirrel, and as foumart ferocious, up speels, by the height undizzied, the dreadless Dominie; and should there be fledged or puddock-haired young ones among the wool, whirling with guttural cawings down a hundred feet descent, on the hard rooty ground floor from which springs pine, oak, or ash, driven out is the life, with a squelsh and a squash, from the worthless carrion. At swimming we should not boggle to back him for the trifle of a cool hundred against the best survivor among those water-serpents, Mr Turner, Dr Bedale, Lieutenant Ekenhead, Lord Byron, Leander, and Ourselves--while, with the steel shiners on his soles, into what a set of ninnies in their ring would he not reduce the Edinburgh Skating Club?

Saw ye ever a Snowball Bicker? Never! Then look there with all the eyes in your head--only beware of a bash on the bridge of your nose, a bash that shall dye the snow with your virgin blood. The Poet-pedagogue, _alias_ the Mad Dominie, with Bob Howie as his Second in Command, has chosen the Six stoutest striplings for his troop, and, at the head of that Sacred Band, offers battle to Us at the head of the whole School.

Nor does that formidable force decline the combat. War levels all foolish distinctions of scholarship. Booby is Dux now, and Dux Booby--and the obscure dunce is changed into an illustrious hero.

"The combat deepens--on, ye brave, Who rush to glory or the grave!

Wave, Nitton, all thy banners wave, And charge with all thy schoolery!"

Down from the mount on which it had been drawn up in battle array, in solid square comes the School army, with shouts that might waken the dead, and inspire with the breath of life the nostrils of the great Snow-giant built up at the end of yonder avenue, and indurated by last night's frost. But there lies a fresh fall--and a better day for a bicker never rose flakily from the yellow East. Far out of distance, and prodigal of powder lying three feet deep on the flats, and heaped up in drifts to tree and chimney-top, the tirailleurs, flung out in front, commence the conflict by a shower of balls that, from the bosom of the yet untrodden snow between the two battles, makes spin like spray the shining surface. Then falling back on the main body, they find their places in the front rank, and the whole mottled mass, grey, blue, and scarlet, moves onwards o'er the whiteness, a moment ere they close,

"Calm as the breeze, but dreadful as the storm!"

"Let fly," cries a clear voice--and the snowball storm hurtles through the sky. Just then the valley-mouth blew sleety in the faces of the foe--their eyes, as if darkened with snuff or salt, blinked bat-like--and with erring aim flew their feckless return to that shower of frosty fire. Incessant is the silent cannonade of the resistless School--silent but when shouts proclaim the fall or flight of some doughty champion in the adverse legion.

See--see--the Sacred Band are broken! The cravens take ignominiously to flight--and the Mad Dominie and Bob Howie alone are left to bear the brunt of battle. A dreadful brotherhood! But the bashing balls are showered upon them right and left from scores of catapultic arms--and the day is going sore against them, though they fight less like men than devils. Hurra! the Dominie's down, and Bob staggers. "Guards, up and at them!" "A simultaneous charge of cocks, hens, and earocks!" No sooner said than done. Bob Howie is buried--and the whole School is trampling on its Master!

"Oh, for a blast of that dread horn, On Fontarabian echoes borne, That to King Charles did come, When Rowland brave and Olivier, And every paladin and peer, On Roncesvalles died!"

The smothered ban of Bob, and the stifled denunciations of the Dominie, have echoed o'er the hill, and,

"Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,"

the runaways, shaking the snows of panic from their pows,