she haven't called me a fool these three of your breakfast. Breakfast - meal in weeks." Here the old lady is visited London almost unknown, greedily deby her odious, hypocritical, successful voured in Brighton! In yon vessels now nephew, Mr. Pitt Crawley; by the gentle nearing the shore, the sleepless mariner Lady Jane Sheepshanks; and by that for- has ventured forth to seize the delicate midable philanthropist, the Countess of whiting, the greedy and foolish mackerel, Southdown, who visits the invalid, armed and the homely sole. Hark to the twangwith tracts, and benevolently determined ing horn! It is the early coach going out to provide for her physical and spiritual to London. Your eye follows it, and rests welfare, by removing her from the care of on the pinnacles built by the beloved that dangerous and ignorant practitioner, George. See the worn-out London roué Mr. Creamer, and by bringing her under pacing the pier, inhaling the sea-air, and the pious ministrations of that awakening casting furtive glances under the bonnets man, the Rev. Bartholomew Irons. Here, of the pretty girls who trot here before too, we are introduced to that interesting lessons! Mark the bilious lawyer, esyouth, Jim Crawley, the loutish Oxford caped for the day from Pump Court, and undergraduate, who, as his father boasted, sniffing the fresh breezes before he goes had had the advantages of a university back to breakfast, and the bag full of briefs education, and had been plucked only at the Albion! See that pretty string twice. Sent as ambassador to keep on of prattling schoolgirls, from the chubbygood terms with his aunt and her seventy cheeked, flaxen-headed, little maiden just thousand pounds, this young gentleman toddling by the side of the second teacher, arrives by coach, with his favorite bull- to the arch damsel of fifteen, giggling and dog, Towzer, in company with the Tut- conscious of her beauty, whom Miss Grifbury Pet, who is travelling to Brighton to fin, the stern head-governess, awfully reengage in the prize-ring with the Rotting- proves! See Tompkins, with a telescope dean Fibber. and marine jacket; young Nathan and young Abrams, already bedizened in jew. ellery, and rivalling the sun in Oriental splendor; yonder poor invalid crawling along in her chair; yonder jolly fat lady examining the Brighton pebbles (I actually once saw a lady buy one), and her children wondering at the sticking-plaister portraits with gold hair, and gold stocks, and prodigious high-heeled boots, miracles of art and cheap at seven and sixpence."

Another of the localities haunted by Thackeray's characters the Chain Pier has suffered sad reverses from the fickleness of fashion. Formerly a wonder of engineering skill-Faraday, by the way, mentions it as the one thing worth seeing in Brighton it now has its rivals at every watering-place of note, and is completely overshadowed by its more fashionable neighbor, the West Pier. But one almost fancies one sees the gay scene, and feels the fresh breezes as one reads Thackeray's vivid description:

"The Chain Pier, as every one knows, runs intrepidly into the sea, which sometimes, in fine weather, bathes its feet with laughing wavelets, and anon, on stormy days, dashes over its sides with roaring foam. Here, for the sum of twopence, you can go out to sea and pace this vast deck without need of a steward with a basin. You can watch the sun setting in splendor over Worthing, or illuminating with its rising the ups and downs of Rottingdean. You see the citizen with his family inveigled into the shallops of the mercenary native mariner, and fancy that the motion cannot be pleasant; and how the hirer of the boat, otium et oppidi laudans rura sui, haply sighs for ease, and prefers Richmond or Hampstead. You behold a hundred bathing-machines put to sea. Along the rippled sands - stay, are they rippled sands or shingly beach? the prawn-boy seeks the delicious material

This is the scene of Philip Firmin's rencontre with his fiancée Agnes, and her new lover. Proceeding down "the steps, under which the waves shimmer greenly, and into quite a quiet corner just over the water, whence you may command a most beautiful view of the sea, the shore, the Marine Parade, and the Albion Hotel," he finds his faithless Agnes and her favored suitor deeply engaged in conversation, the subject of which was nothing less romantic than pug-dogs.

Even Brighton is not always bright and gay, and those who have encountered a "brave north-easter " there, will appreciate Thackeray's allusion to "that fine, cutting, east wind, which blows so liberally along the Brighton cliffs."

Was it the influence of this cutting east wind, or the boredom of some inconvenient acquaintance, that inspired Thackeray to speak so feelingly of the one fault in Brighton? "It is too near London ... Was ever such a tohu-bohu of people as assembled there? You can't be tranquil

if you will. Organs pipe and scream with- | first night; and Mrs. Cribb, who "still out cease at your windows. Your name went cutting pounds and pounds of meat is put down in the papers when you arrive; off the lodgers' jints;" and Mr. Gawler, and everybody meets everybody ever so with his fly-blown card constantly in his many times a day." The grumble about window. Here might be seen the arrival "inconvenient acquaintance" and the "in- of Lady Anne Newcome, with her two sidious London fog," doubtless, merely carriages, two maids, three children, and expresses some momentary irritation; for "man 'hout a livery;" and here, on anThackeray's recently published letters other occasion, arrives the brave old coloshow how strong his liking for Brighton nel, when he rushes down to Brighton to really was. make the acquaintance of the good lady who had won his gratitude by her kindness to Clive.

But we have given reminiscences enough. When absent from Brighton it is pleasant to recall the lively scenes as they are presented in Thackeray's pages; and when these happy haunts are actually present before our eyes, it is inevitable that imagination should wander back and memory recall the old-world characters with which the great novelist has peopled them.

For fashionable personages, of course, the decrees of society determine the proper time for visiting Brighton; and perhaps society has not selected a bad time. But persons who, from the humbleness of their station, or from the peculiar independence of their characters, can take their pleasure when it pleases them, will find that Brighton has some special attractions at a less popular time. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of the haughty old Dowager Countess of Kew, who used to set conventions at defiance, and remove thither when the London season was at its height, on the ground that in the spring "the crowd of bourgeois has not invaded Brighton; the drive is not blocked up by flys; and you can take the air in your chair upon the Chain Pier, without being stifled by the cigars of odious shop-boys from Lon-"OFF with it, old fellow, before you start! don." Taking the air on the Chain Pier A glass of good wine will cheer your heart. seems rather a tame amusement for the The night is cold, you have far to go, scheming old dowager; but then she had And deep on the track lies the drifted snow!" the constant occupation of tyrannizing Out from the revel swarm, over her family and listening to the scandal which her medical attendant supplied in proper doses for her entertainment.

To the modern visitor the Steyne has a somewhat faded appearance solid and respectable rather than gay and fashionable; but in the early days of Brighton's prosperity it was the very centre of fashionable life. Here might be seen, on the promenade, Lord Chancellor Thurlow, Sir Philip Francis, Foote the actor, Philip Egalité, the Duke of Clarence, and the prince himself, with all the other celebrities of the period who flocked down to Brighton.

among the "mansions with bow windows in front, bulging out with gentle prominences and ornamented with neat verandahs, from which you can behold the tide of humankind as it flows up and down the Steyne, and that blue ocean over which Britain is said to rule, stretching brightly away eastward and westward " honest Miss Honeyman lived and prospered, to the envy and annoyance of her neighbors, Mrs. Bugsby, whose visitors but too frequently departed after the very

66

From Blackwood's Magazine. THE LAST STRING.

FROM THE GERMAN OF GUSTAV HARTWIG.

Good-night!

Out from the room, hot, steaming, low,
His trusty fiddle tucked under his arm,
Stepped the fiddler, -round him all ice and

snow.

Just as his bow he had stoutly plied,
So down the street does he briskly stride.
His home is distant some seven miles good,
But a shorter cut lies through the wood.

Great God, what cold! It chills me so,
Body and bone! Through the wood I'll go!
Many's the time that I at dead
Of night that self-same road have sped."
Lit by the moon, the pine-trees throw
Their shadows dark o'er the sheeted snow:
All round is hushed as death, save where
A falling branch crashes through the air.

The fiddler, a merry man is he,
For he hears in his pocket clink the fee,
His fiddle for him has so dearly bought;
And already he is at his home in thought.
Like countless arms the trees they throw
Their branches out, all swathed in snow,
Into the night, a ghostly clan,
Weird-like and blanched in the moonlight

wan.

"Hark! What stirs there in the thicket | Then a grating, groaning, agonized thing,

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Thou, like a flame when the stormy winds fan So late, so late! it,

I, like a rock to the elements bare, — Mixed by love's magic, the fire and the granite, Who should compete with us, what should compare?

Strong with a strength that no fate might dis

ing!

How fast the hours are fly

How soon the world, and we therewith, older,

grown

Sink into shadow! Night winds, breathing
colder,

Their sad lament across the lake are sighing;
O'erhead the melancholy seabird crying

Sweeps westward; night rolls down the
mountain's shoulder;

Scarce, should she come now, could mine eyes behold her,