ADVENTURES OF A SERENADED 



IT was the latter end of a gloomy and cheerless June ; there had heen, 

 throughout the month, so many anachronisms in the weather, that all sage 

 prognosticators had forsworn their barometers, and Moore's Almanack was 

 scouted as a false prophet. But this sullenness of nature had at length 

 been subdued ; and, as intricate discords in music frequently precede 

 the most gentle and liquid melody, so in the harmony of the visible 

 world, it seemed as if the year's sadness had passed away, and summer 

 had come forth triumphantly, to perform her work of joy. I was escap- 

 ing from the durance vile of a town life, and hastening to the green 

 fields, of which I loved to babble, with a light and a happy heart. Few, 

 indeed, can luxuriate in the freedom of soul, such as I then felt, if there 

 have not been some previous restriction on its free agency, something 

 to clip its wing in the loftiest flight of exultation, and remind it of the 

 stale world which it must not entirely disregard. As I mounted the 

 Aurora, light post coach, the vehicle seemed little inferior to the car of 

 Phaeton. My good friends to the right and left, whose elbows gave me 

 a palpable argument of their materiality, were deified in my eves, as 

 fellow wanderers to Elysium ; and even our portly charioteer, embow- 

 elled as he was in a professional Witney, and bearing in his speech 

 some testimony of human extraction, appeared little less than a minister- 

 ing angel ; of comely dimensions indeed, and not quite so ethereal as 

 might be expected for gentlemen in that capacity. There is some- 

 thing, too, in the swift motion, by which we are hurried through the air, 

 that seems to give our spirits a still more exquisite tone. I became, 

 indeed, .more and more enthusiastic, so that when our journey was com- 

 pleted, the common catastrophe of warm gin and water, or an abdica- 

 tion of one's boots, in favour of some household slippers with an illus- 

 trious pedigree, was bathos so profound, that human nature could not 

 be reconciled to it ; however, as I had not the wishing cap of Fortuna- 

 tus, nor a horse with wings at my disposal, that I might emigrate to one 

 of last year's visible planets, or to that rascally Comet, which afterwards 

 gave me the ophthalmia, I was e'en content to look unutterable things 

 at the deserted grate, and ponder over a curious dilution of brandy. 

 " Marvellous strange is it," thought I, " that the fashion of these things 

 should be so much altered ; a man is not honest now-a-days, unlesshegives 

 up his romance for a table-spoonful of most equivocal liquor. The silent 

 stars are fast losing their jurisdiction over adventurous knights-errant ; 

 nor is it conceivable what Byron could have been dreaming about, when, 

 in the feeling of antique times, he exclaimed ' The Devil's in the moon 

 for mischief ;' and yet more strange, that people should go on in their 

 perverse adherence to decorum and police regulations, although they 

 sigh over the loves of Petrarch, and loiter in the Arcadia of Sir Philip 

 Sydney ! Do they reverence the chivalry of those days, and yet wil- 

 lingly retreat from the condition of its heroes ? Can they listen to the 



