drunken Lord Granby, and far-too-jolly Sir Harry Vane, made a night of it at 'Vauxhall,' where the gentlemen cut up the chickens which frolicsome Lady Caroline stewed in a saucepan over a lamp in one of the bowers. Fielding, too, who published his 'Amelia' in 1751, sends some of his friends in that story to as turbulent but a less pleasant night at roaring 'Vauxhall.'

"Fireworks came in with the French revolu- Fireworks. tionary wars, and with them came high prices and unpronounceable Greek (or quasi-Greek) names, which did not describe the entertainments they pretended to designate. The fee for admission ran up, by instalments, from one shilling to four; but the patronage of fashion did not rise in an equal ratio, and the gardens, which did not blossom sweetly under the first of the Georges, sank into cheapness and ruin under the last so named of that illustrious race of monarchs. The weather, too, had been their unkind enemy. The special fête days were ever so notoriously damaged by deluges of rain, that men of pastures would not cut their hay on that day; while one of the Tyerses (we forget now which) was so continuously unlucky, that farmers laid down broad acres of turnips as they heard of the continuation of his proprietorship.

"One week more of modified madness-a

melancholy gaiety—and streets will rise where well-dressed folly so long and so riotously reigned, - where Billington poured forth her honeyed notes and Incledon his 'linked sweetness,'where I Diavolo Antonio swung by one foot on the slack wire, pealing forth from a silver trumpet, as he swung, the overture to 'Lodoiska,' -and where the terrible gaieties of the night were succeeded by the terrible penalties of 'next morning.' What is to come for a week is the The "wake" wake' of a dead, not the reproduction of a Vauxhall living, Vauxhall. The lights, and the drink, and the garishness will be there where the song of the old nightingales has long been silentfor ever."

of a dead

Leigh Hunt.

The

Examiner.

James Henry Leigh Hunt died on the 28th of August. He was born on the 19th of October, 1784. In 1808 he joined his brother John in editing the Examiner, and it was on the 22nd of March, 1812, that his article on the Prince Regent appeared for which he was indicted. The Athenæum, in the obituary notice of him which appeared on September 3rd, 1859, states: "Leigh Hunt wielded one of the most vigorous lances in the forlorn hope of Liberals, who, long before 'Reform' was popular, fought against the civil and religious bigotry of the time. His articles in the Examiner denouncing the Prince Regent were as bitterly hostile as any that came

on the Prince Regent.

from the pen of Junius. Assuredly Leigh Hunt His articles showed no weak shrinking when his hand laid. on the lash, and it is in no way surprising that the Government were provoked into retaliation. It is said in compiled' biographies of Leigh Hunt that he was imprisoned for two years for calling the Regent 'an Adonis of fifty'; but the cause of offence was much more serious......

"His ephemeral notices of plays and players in the News (a journal which preceded the Examiner) were stamped with the fairness.

and freedom which marked his critical writings His critical throughout his life. writings. But, independently of the honesty of his nature, he possessed every requisite for superior criticism. He was a man of various reading, a good scholar, was catholic in taste, and widely sympathetic in feeling. The purely literary essays - the 'Indicator' and its companion publications -and the volumes Wit and Humour' and 'Imagination and Fancy' are fine, almost faultless, specimens of genial criticism......He thought no toil too great in hunting out small facts that he might do his literary tasks with conscientious workmanship; a few pages of his antiquarian works (such as 'The Town; or, the Old Court Suburb') represented weeks of the most diligent drudgery in searches over parish registers and local records. As he advanced in life, from VOL. II.

H

The Old

Court

Suburb.'

nature.

youth to middle age, he was a living refutation of the worldly maxims which attribute generosity to youth, and harder virtues to maturity and old age. In literature, as in daily life, as he grew

His kindly older he became kindly and considerate to a fault. When he had passed fifty, he no more could have written the philippic against the Regent than he could have fought a duel. The indignation against wrong-doing would be as warm, the courage to face a prison would be as high, but to the 'pith and moment' of the young journalist would be added the 'pale cast of thought' of the man who had known suffering both physical and mental, and who could not, without some compunction, deliver his 'swashing blow,' as in the days of youth. This tenderness and delicacy were no signs of intellectual decay; they were the evidence of growth in one who was no mere literary partisan, but a man, sharing human sympathies and not able to carry into discussion the intensity of hot youth seeing no right save on its own side. We think there is something like a poem in this twofold life of Leigh Hunt-known to one generation as the fearless martyr to truth, to the other as a tender poet, an essayist touching nothing that he did not brighten......Up to the last he took an interest in the literature and news of the day, and within the last few weeks he contributed some

remarks on Shelley to the Spectator. He was passionately fond of music. Almost his last words were in applause of an Italian song sung by his daughter in the next room, and at the final moment he passed away without pain."

It is announced on the 5th of November that "Mr. Thackeray is to bring out his magazine on The Cornhill New Year's Day. His plans are already laid Magazine. down. He is not going, he says, to set the Thames on fire or regenerate society-only to do his best to please and amuse the town. He proposes to seek an audience of gentlemen and gentlewomen for his sermon, and to take care that all the matter to which he shall lend the sanction of his name and popularity shall be such as one gentleman might write and another may read. So far so good. Such a publication should have a humour and a place of its own. We wish Mr. Thackeray every success."

On the same day the first number of another new magazine is referred to:-" Mr. Macmillan's Macmillan's Magazine has anticipated the New Year, and Magazine. has made its appearance under the careful generalship of Prof. Masson. It is a good opening number. A review of political affairs, from the philosophical rather than the partisan point of sight, three chapters of 'Tom Brown at Oxford,' 'Pen, Ink, and Paper,' by Prof. George