“The Last Whistle” and “Here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling!” stirring the manly heart like the sound of a trumpet! It is wise to infuse the amorpatriæ into popular amusements; national songs work wonders among the million. In Little Russia, no sooner are the postilions mounted for a journey, than they begin to hum a patriotic air, which often continues for hours without intermission. The soldiers sing during a long and fatiguing march; the peasant lightens his labour in the same manner; and in a still evening the air vibrates with the cheerful songs of the surrounding villages.
“'Hark! the lark at Heaven's gate sings.'”
“I was not unmindful of the merry chorister! But the lark has made a pause; and I have your promise of a song. Now is the time to fill up the one, and to fulfil the other.”
“Short and sad! Eugenio. We must away from these bewitching solitudes, or thy note will belong more to the nightingale than to the lark! Let imagination carry thee back to the reign of Queen Anne, when the Spectator and Sir Roger de Coverley embarked at the Temple-Stairs on their voyage to Vauxhall. We pass over the good knight's religious horror at beholding what a few steeples rose on the west of Temple-Bar; and the waterman's wit, (a common thing in those days, * ) that made him almost wish himself a Middlesex magistrate!
* What a sledge-hammer reply was Doctor Johnson's to an aquatic wag upon a similar occasion. “Fellow! your mother, under the _pretence_ (!!!) of keeping a ------------ is a receiver of stolen goods!”
'We were now arrived at _Spring Garden_ says the Spectator, 'which is exquisitely pleasant at this time of the year. When I considered the fragrancy of the walks and bowers, with the choir of birds that sang upon the trees, and the loose tribe of people that walked under their shades, I could not but look upon the place as a kind of Mahometan paradise. Sir Roger told me it put him in mind of a little coppice by his house in the country, which his chaplain used to call an aviary of nightingales.' “And mark in what primitive fashion they concluded their walk, with a glass of Burton ale and a slice of hung-beef!
“Bonnel Thornton furnishes a ludicrous account of a stingy old citizen, loosening his purse-strings to treat his wife and family to Vauxhall; and 'Colin's * 'Description to his wife of _Greenwood Hall_, or the pleasures of _Spring Gardens_,' gives a lively picture of what this modern Arcadia was a century ago.