SIR,

A

TTRACTED by the title of your

Magazine, we purchased the first number, in hopes of finding a corner reserved for the grumbles of those who feel themselves aggrieved by various usages of society, which are extremely onerous, and to obtain the abolition of which would be to confer a real blessing on that class of persons who are supposed to be exempt from every social evil-we of course allude to the class of bachelors.

If you will grant a small space to our complaint, we propose to call your attention to two especial grievances, and to beg your influ

ence and help in getting rid of them. The first of these is one from which married men are generally free; and the prospect of immunity from it which matrimony offers is quite enough to account for any number of imprudent unions. In fact, we have often observed that married men, in calculating the advantages of their position, reckon amongst the very first the fact that they now delegate to their wives the duty which was so troublesome to them once. Without further preface, we will add that the grievance to which we here allude is that of cardleaving. We don't complain of bonâ fide calls, made in hopes of

finding at home friends whom we wish to see and converse with, but we are protesting against the cruel farce of travelling miles for the sole purpose of leaving cards at the houses of such of our acquaintance as we wish merely to remind of our existence when it could be done in a much simpler way.

Married men, as we said before, leave these things to their wives, who enjoy the arrangement exceedingly. But there is no plan by which the unhappy bachelor can perform this duty, except at great personal expense and toil. The majority of men one meets with in ordinary London society are more or less engaged up to four o'clock; consequently, if a man's visiting acquaintances are scattered over London, he is obliged to make repeated expeditions in Hansom cabs: first of all to let them know that he is yet alive and in London, and that he will be happy to form one of the crowd about to throng their drawing-rooms; and then, when that pleasure is over, to acknowledge the honour conferred on him. In fact, the necessity of leaving cards is an incubus which weighs heavily on the soul of every unfortunate bachelor whom inclination or a sense of

duty urges into society. The remedy is simple and obvious. What objection could there be to transmitting cards by post? It would surely answer every purpose as well as knocking at a door, and thrusting your card into the hands of a powdered footman, and bolting. If society would consent to receive cards by post we are sure that bachelors would not prove ungrateful for the boon. The second grievance to which we allude is, that a bachelor is never allowed to know when he is old enough to give up dancing, and to leave such an amusement to more youthful competitors. After thirty very few men care about dancing in the least: they would personally avoid it if they could. But that is

no easy matter. If they have dined at the house of Mrs. A

or Mrs. B they are well aware that if they wish to be asked to dinner again they must not fail to present themselves at the ball which those ladies will probably give during the season. They present themselves to their hostess, and in compliance with her request may have joined a few dances, in hopes of purchasing for the rest of the evening a little peace. But, no; it cannot be allowed by any means. By virtue of their unattached condition a duty devolves upon them, which they must discharge. There sit rows of young ladies, lovely in wreaths and muslin, who are longing to dance, and it seems churlish to refuse to make them happy when pressed to do so. The consequence is, that men spend the evening in dodging their hostess, who is bent on catching them, or yield to their fate with the best grace they can

assume.

Nor is Darwin's theory of natural selection allowed in drawing-rooms. If the victim is a very tall man he is generally consigned to some petite whose waist he can just manage to reach by bending double. If he is a very short man he will probably find himself standing on the tips of his toes, attempting to encircle the waist of some fair Juno who towers above him by a head and shoulders. And as the lookers-on watch his frantic efforts to control the rush of his partner through the mazy waltz, they have an opportunity of observing the sublime but ridiculous sight of a brave man struggling with his destiny--for it will be his destiny to be obliged to dance until he becomes incapacitated by old age, or is absolutely driven into matrimony. Feebly, sir, as we have portrayed these grievances, we hope you will kindly afford space for the insertion of the lament of

A BRACE OF BACHELORS.

VOL. I.--NO. III.

T

HE head-quarters of the Penin

sular and Occidental Company had, for many ages anterior to the fifth century before Christ, been fixed on the easternmost shore of the Mediterranean; and the western limits of the trading voyages of its liners had been the ports of Southern Spain, and the Cassiterides or Tin Islands of Britain. Tyre had at this Tyre had at this time lost the prestige of virgin splendour and impregnability; and had suffered an instalment of those woes which had been denounced against her in scatheful, prophetic numbers. Thanks, however, to the elasticity of her reproductive powers, she was again the great mart of nations, the city of merchant princes. Her borders were again strong in the midst of the sea; and her visage, once perfect, restored to its pristine beauty in all but this-that when she smiled, the scar left by Babylon deepened into furrow, and the actual shadow of the Persian sceptre fell dark and strong upon her when she looked defiant. She was yet a merchant of the people to many isles; yet her vessels bore over the waters the revenues of distant kings; yet she clothed her people in purple and fine linen; and yet she heaped up silver as the dust, and fine gold as the mire of the streets.'

Say it is a day of the year B.C. 450, and both day and year are in their spring-time. An off-shore breeze is liberating the argosies that have been wind-bound in the harbour. As they row seaward, sheet after sheet is loosened, flapping to the gale. Alongside, prow by prow, oar by oar, stroke by stroke, in stately march, move out the 'Phonix' and the 'Hiram,' presently, with mutual cheers, to part, the one for Egypt, and the other, via Cyprus and Rhodes, for Smyrna. Third, and unfellowed, follows the 'Ashtaroth,' the crack ship of the Tyrian P. and O. flotilla. Her crew are picked men of Sidon, Aco, and Tyre; and her cargo, whatever of most precious Asia has to give to Europe. Her timbers are of Senir

fir-wood; her masts are cedars from the Libanus; her oars are of oak of Bashan; her benches and hatches of ivory of the Isles of Chittim; her sails of fine linen, with embroidered work of Egypt; and her awnings of scarlet and purple. An image of the goddess after whom she is named adorns her prow-that same Dea Syra who afterwards came to draw so widely on the popular piety of the Roman world, when her priests, drunken vagabond hypocrites, of the morals and social standing of modern gipsies, wandered about with a miserable ass on whose back was borne aloft, in awful state, a dingy, tawdry doll-divinity, in whose name faithful rustics were invited, to the accompaniment of Phrygian airs on castanets and cymbals, to contribute their alms of small money and broken victuals. The good ship leaves port to the festive sound of song and harp; and an inquisitive stranger from Halicarnassus sees her go.* First, with her miscellaneous

* Sees, but does not see. The truth is, that Herodotus-for it is he whom we identify in the Halicarnassian stranger— has come to Tyre to inspect a famous temple of Hercules, which is still fresh and awful from the ages of remotest legendary antiquity. His speculations, as he saunters by the harbour, are so fixed upon its pillars of fine gold and emerald which make night divinely instrous, that he omits to indulge his wonted universal curiosity. The fact that he has left no information about the Cassiterides, except that they were situated somewhere or anywhere in the uttermost parts of the western world, is an incidental voucher for the success with which the Phoenician merchants, jealous of a profitable monopoly, enforced upon their navigators a sacred obligation to silence. If the Father of History had tipped the bold black-eyed sailor whom he dreamily jostled by the dock-side, that ancient mariner, anxious to secure his bribe at the same time that he kept his oath, might, more nautico, have spun him such an inventive yarn as would glowingly have taken the place of the historian's bald notices of the Tin Islands and the Lands of the Celt. Seriously, it is possible that it was because the time and attention of Herodotus, during his stay at Tyre, were so taken up with the elabora

cargo, she makes for Piræus, the maritime emporium of Athens, to which, amongst other commodities of use and luxury, she carries a consignment of Hebrew slaves, kidnapped for Grecian markets. From the Piræus, she steers for Carthage, the Tyre of Africa. Then further, to the west, impelled over the blue waters of the tideless sea, she passes the Pillars of Hercules, and pays a commercial visit to Gades, another Tyrian colony, founded in discharge of the command of ancient oracles. Leaving the abundant springs of the silver-bedded Tartessus, whose mouth breathes to the western ocean the fragrance wafted from banks which hide themselves under orange groves, she sets forth to scale the shifting mountains of the Atlantic. Northward, and northward ever, past Finisterre, till at length another Land's End looms through the haze, and the Ultima Thule-of her voyage at least is reached, and harbour made on the southern coast of Cornwall or of Ireland.

For

We have two or three reasons for introducing the foregoing epitome of the log of the Ashtaroth' into a paper titled like the present. The Phoenicians, and they only of all the civilized world of that day, knew of the whereabouts of Britain. perhaps more than five hundred years before the particular voyage we now immortalize, they had traded with the Silures and the Dumnonii, to whom they brought salt, earthenware, brass, chains, necklaces, and other knicknacks of civilization, and took, in return, wool, skins, lead, and tin, the latter of which then ranked in the high places of the world as the foremost and most valuable of the metals. But further, these princely merchants, in thus repairing to the people of Britain, were

tion of that theory of the twofold Hercules, which gives profundity to the 44th and 45th chapters of his Euterpe,' that his knowledge of the regions beyond Calpe and Abyla was so hazy. It would not be wonderful if in those days, historically as well as commercially, Britain had to suffer for the mythical suggestiveness and the material grandeur of the Phoenician city.

visiting their own kinsmen-their poor relations-who had, perhaps, whilst national organization presented only the airy cohesion of nomadic hordes, gone off from their primitive Asiatic seats in the direction of the setting sun, leaving another body of their race to consolidate itself in the country between Libanus and the Mediterranean. From this district the westwardgoing pioneers, some of whom had wandered as far as utmost Europe, had been ever and anon reinforced by stragglers, or sparsely colonized by exodes rendered compulsory by the aggression of the Israelites upon the inland borders of their Phoenician brethren. These, pressed and excited into an amphibious activity, had developed an enterprise which in time had made their treasury the riches of the world. Such also, in part, may have been the causes, which, in their operation, lined the coasts and sprinkled half the islands of the Mediterranean with a people whose mother-tongue was one of which, for want of anything better or nearer, the Erse has been regarded as the closest surviving representative. We are not going to flounder amongst ethnological probabilities; we are not going to deny all or any of the hypotheses which derive the primitive inhabitants of Britain from Gaul, Germany, Greece, Egypt, or even from the moon, if any one likes to take up the theory of a remote lunarian immigration, darkly suggested by the knowing gravedigger in Hamlet. Still less are we desirous of throwing discredit upon the touching, venerable tradition of the Britons themselves, that they were island-born. Only we may postulate a greater or less community of blood between the Briton and the Tyrian; or, if that be disallowed, intimate how such a community might be supported by the lingering evidence, long drawn out, of community of rite and superstition; of topographical and theological nomenclature, if not of entire language or dialect.

Now it is all very well for the commander of the Ashtaroth,' and the supercargo, and the influential P. and O. director's son, who is out

to see the world, to land at their own sweet wills, either on the shore of that bay on which stands the town lately and loyally transformed from Cove of Cork to Queenstown, or to make for the Cornish harbour which best suits their purpose. They, it is presumed, know what they are about, and will not seriously imperil the safety of their persons, which, precious to themselves, are also sacred to the supple-witted people of the coast as the incarnations of profit, as the angels of salt, hardware, and bracelets. But where shall an amateur voyager, undefended by the tutelary god of traffic, find a safe landing-place? Shall he essay Ierne? Its gentle inhabitants affectionately inter their defunct parents by mouthfuls; and for a breakfast, make light of half a stone of flesh which itself has been heretofore quickened and enriched by the juices of its kind. Oh! delicate readeralas! too delicate and delicately flavoured-beware of the Erin of the fifth ante-Christian century. Betray not the trusting, unsophisticated native to his own disaster. Accustomed to brawn and savage thews, he would with difficulty assimilate the finer tissues of a dish in which you should play the distinguished part of principal ingredient. About you an ethereal soupçon of mental culture subtly lingering, might, whilst it whetted his habitually unpampered appetite, inflict upon him. a troubled digestion, or even invite nightmare and hideous dreams in which he should profanely doubt the favour of his gods. If, apart from considerations of tenderness to the hypothetical dyspeptic, you have any personal scruples to piecemeal sepulture in half a dozen living mausolea, it is manifest that not the clamouring echoes of Biscay hazards so lately escaped, nor yet the pleaded weariness of a tedious voyage ought to prevail upon us to land you here.

Even the inhabitants, compara'tively refined, of Cornwall and Devon are, to persons unaccustomed to approach them, as docile as wolves would be in the fresh, first joy of freedom from the pious restrictions of a lupine lent; and what charms have you to soothe the savage breast?

You are no Sidonian mariner to make your peace with twopenny ornaments and bric-à-brac; no Tyrian skipper to pay black mail in the shape of a cast-off purple mantle in which some gigantic chief-enfolding the well-arched hugeness of his chest and veiling the noble sinuosities of his legs, beautifully and in the true spirit of adventure receding from each other into the spaces of the outer world shall grandly strut, as struts to-day on the fevered strand of tropical Africa, his majesty Quashee, in regalia of napless cocked hat and tarnished epaulets. Let us leave the island at its anchorage to ride out a quarantine of a couple of centuries. It will by that time be a little purified from its taint of blood; and we will then land, not upon a sterile spur of Cornwall, but on the banks of Tamessa, now royal-towered Thames, and crowned with the diadems of kingdoms from Columbia to Ceylon ; of lands that hibernate beneath the stolid stare of Boötes, or that open genially out to the mild gaze of the Southern Cross.

Here two or three grave considerations meet us-meet us, but do not appal. First we are conscious that our dramatic spectacle is proceeding in violation of the unities. But since Voltaire is dead, and his school of criticism buried with full rites and jubilant requiem, we are not sleeplessly anxious upon that score. The difficulty of ascertaining the social condition of the islanders of Britain before their country first became generally known to the world, is a weightier matter. Their comparative culture or rudeness has been debated with much bitterness and decision; with much philosophically indifferent assertion and quasi-patriotic denial; and is even yet a quæstio vexata. We deftly avoid the necessity of partisanship by fixing on a time for our visit when the most enthusiastic of philoBritish apologists, making due allowance for the operation of the laws of progress, or rather reading these backwards to arrive at our selected era, dare not cavil if we discover a state of society for the most part such as has been handed down by