in laughing, showed teeth exquisitely white and even. But though his profile was clearly cut, it was far from the Greek ideal; and he wanted the height of stature which is usually considered essential to the personal pretensions of the male sex. Without being positively short, he was still under middle height, and, from the compact development of his proportions, seemed already. to have attained his full growth. His dress, though not foreign, like his comrade's, was peculiar:---a broadbrimmed straw-hat, with a wide blue ribbon; shirt-collar turned down, leaving the throat bare; a dark-green jacket of thinner material than cloth; white trousers and waistcoat completed his costume. He looked like a mother's darling-perhaps he was one.

Bulwer.

UNCLE TOBY AND HIS MINIATURE SIEGES.

If the reader has not got a clear conception of the rood and the half of ground which lay at the bottom of my uncle Toby's kitchen-garden, and which was the scene of so many of his delicious hours, the fault is not in me, but in his imagination, for I am sure I gave him so minute a description, I was almost ashamed of it. My uncle Toby came down, as the reader has been informed, with plans along with him, of almost every fortified town in Italy and Flanders; so let the Duke of Marlborough, or the allies, have set down before what town they pleased, my uncle Toby was prepared for them.

His way, which was the simplest one in the world was this: as soon as ever a town was invested (but sooner when the design was known), to take the plan of it (let it be what town it would), and enlarge it upon a scale to the exact size of his bowling-green; upon the surface of which, by means of a large roll of pack-thread, and a number of small piquets driven into the ground, at the several angles and redans, he transferred the lines from his paper; then taking the profile of the place, with its works, to determine the depths

and slopes of the ditches, he set the Corporal to work, and sweetly it went on. The nature of the soil, the neture of the work itself, and, above all, the good nature of my uncle Toby, sitting by from morning to night, and chatting kindly with the Corporal upon pastdone deeds, left labour little else but the ceremony of the name.

When the place was finished in this manner, and put into a proper posture of defence, it was invested; and my uncle Toby and the Corporal began to run their first parallel. I beg I may not be interrupted in my story by being told that the first parallel should be at least three hundred toises distant from the main body of the place, and that I have not left a single inch for it; for my uncle Toby took the liberty of encroaching upon his kitchen-garden, for the sake of enlarging his works on the bowling-green; and for that reason, generally ran his first and second parallels betwixt two rows of his cabbages and cauliflowers; the conveniences and inconveniences of which will be considered at large in the history of my uncle Toby's campaigns, of which this I'm now writing is but a sketch.

When the town with its works was finished, my uncle Toby and the Corporal began to run their first parallel, not at random, or anyhow, but from the same points and distances the allies had begun to run theirs; and regulating their approaches and attacks by the accounts my uncle Toby received from the daily papers, they went on, during the whole siege, step by step, with the allies. When the Duke of Marlborough made a lodgment, my uncle Toby made a lodgment too; and when the face of a bastion was battered down, or a defence ruined, the corporal took his mattock and did as much; and so on, gaining ground, and making themselves masters of the works, one after another, till the town fell into their hands. To one who took pleasure in the happy state of others, there could not have been a greater sight in the world, than on a post-morning, in which a practicable breach had been made by the Duke of Marlborough in the main body of the place, to have

stood behind the horn-beam hedge, and observed the spirit with which my uncle Toby, with Trim behind him, sallied forth, the one with the Gazette in his hand, the other with a spade on his shoulder, to execute the contents. What an honest triumph in my uncle Toby's looks as he marched up to the ramparts! what intense pleasure swimming in his eye as he stood over the Corporal, reading the paragraph ten times over to him, as he was at work, lest peradventure, he should make the breach an inch too wide, or leave it an inch too narrow! But when the chamade was beat, and the Corporal, helped my uncle up it, and followed with the colours in his hand, to fix them upon the ramparts,Heaven! Earth! Sea!-but what avail apostrophes ?with all your elements, wet or dry, ye never compounded so intoxicating a draught.

In this track of happiness, for many years, without one interruption to it, except now and then when the wind continued to blow due west for a week or ten days together, which detained the Flanders mail, and kept them so long in torture, but still it was the torture of the happy,-in this track, I say, did my uncle Toby and Trim move for many years, every year of which, and sometimes every month, from the invention of either the one or the other of them, adding some new conceit or quirk of improvement to their operations, which always opened fresh springs of delight in carrying them on. The first year's campaign was carried on, from beginning to end, in the plain and simple method I've related. In the second year, in which my uncle Toby took Liege and Ruremond, he thought he might afford the expense of four handsome drawbridges. At the latter end of the same year he added a couple of gates with portcullises; and during the winter of the same year, my uncle Toby, instead of a new suit of clothes, which he always had at Christmas, treated himself with a handsome sentry-box, to stand at the corner of the bowling-green, betwixt which point and the foot of the glacis there was left a little kind of an esplanade, for him and the Corporal to confer and

hold councils of war upon. The sentry-box was in case of rain. All these were painted white three times over the ensuing spring, which enabled my uncle Toby to take the field with great splendour.

My father would often say to Yorick, that if any mortal in the whole universe had done such a thing except his brother Toby, it would have been looked upon by the world as one of the most refined satires upon the parade and prancing manner in which Louis XIV.,

from the beginning of the war, but particularly

that very year, had taken the field. But 'tis not in my brother Toby's nature, kind soul! my father would add, to insult any one.

Sterne.

CHARACTER OF FALSTAFF.

If Shakspeare's fondness for the ludicrous sometimes led to faults in his tragedies (which was not often the case), he has made us amends by the character of Falstaff. This is perhaps the most substantial comic character that ever was invented. Sir John carries a

most portly presence in the mind's eye. We are as well acquainted with his person as his mind, and his jokes come upon us with double force and relish from the quantity of flesh through which they make their way, as he shakes his fat sides with laughter, or "lards the lean earth as he walks along." Other comic characters seem, if we approach and handle them, to resolve themselves into air-"into thin air;" but this is embodied and palpable to the grossest apprehension: it lies "three fingers deep upon the ribs;" it plays about the lungs and the diaphragm with all the force of animal enjoyment. His body is like a good estate to his mind, from which he receives rents and revenues of profit and pleasure in kind, according to its extent and the richness of the soil. Wit is often a meagre substitute for pleasurable sensation; an effusion of spleen and petty spite at the comforts of others, from feeling none in itself. Falstaff's wit is an emanation

of a fine constitution; an exuberance of good-humour and good-nature, an overflowing of his love of laughter, and good fellowship; a giving vent to his heart's ease, and over-contentment with himself and others. He would not be in character if he were not so fat as he is; for there is the greatest keeping in the boundless luxury of his imagination and the pampered selfindulgence of his physical appetites. He manures and nourishes his mind with jests, as he does his body with sack and sugar. He carves out his jokes as he would a capon or a haunch of venison, where there is cut and come again. His tongue drops fatness, and in the chambers of his brain "it snows of meat and drink.” He keeps up perpetual holiday and open house, and we live with him in a round of invitations to a rumpand-dozen. Yet we are not to suppose that he was a mere sensualist. All this is as much in imagination as in reality. His sensuality does not engross and stupify his other faculties, but "ascends me into the brain, clears away all the dull, crude vapours that environ it, and makes it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes." His imagination keeps up the ball after his senses have done with it. He seems to have even a greater enjoyment of the freedom from restraint, of good cheer, of his ease, of his vanity, in the ideal exaggerated descriptions which he gives of them, than in fact. He never fails to enrich his discourse with allusions to eating and drinking, but we never see him at table. He carries his own larder about with him, and he is himself "a tun of man.' His pulling out the bottle in the field of battle, is a joke to show his contempt for glory accompanied with danger, his systematic adherence to his Epicurean philosophy in the most trying circumstances. Again, such is his deliberate exaggeration of his own vices, that it does not seem quite certain whether the account of his hostess's bill, found in his pocket, with such an out-of-the-way charge for capons and sack with only one half-penny worth of bread, was not put there by himself, as a trick to humour the jest upon his favourite propensities, and as