id="pgepubid00010">TIME.

(For the Mirror.)

LEAR.

SEPULCHRAL ENIGMA.

(To the Editor of the Mirror.)

The following Sepulchral Enigma against Pride, is engraved on a stone, in the Cathedral Church of Hamburgh:

CANON.

The above inscription and Canon are from a very scarce book, me penes; if they are deemed worthy of a place in your entertaining miscellany, and no solution or English version should be offered to your notice for insertion, I will avail myself of your permission to send one for your approval.

Your's, &c. Σ [Greek: S.]

THE VINE—A FRAGMENT.

(For the Mirror.)

C. COLE.

THE COSMOPOLITE.

ON LIBERTY.

So says Gay of the world, in one of his letters to Swift, and we have adapted the quotation to our idea of liberty. True it is that Addison apostrophizes liberty as a

but we hope our laughter will not be considered as indecorous or profane. Our great essayist has exalted her into a Deity, and invested her with a mythological charm, which makes us doubt her existence; so that to laugh at her can be no more irreverend than to sneer at the belief in apparitions, a joke which is very generally enjoyed in these good days of spick-and-span philosophy. Whether Liberty ever existed or not, is to us a matter of little import, since it is certain that she belongs to the grand hoax which is the whole scheme of life. The extension of liberty into concerns of every-day life is therefore reasonable enough, and to prove that we are happy in possessing this ideal blessing, seems to have been the aim of all who have written on the subject. One, however, if we remember right, sets the matter in a grave light, when he says to man—

He who loves to scatter crumbs of comfort in these starving times, will not despair at this sublime truth, but will seek to cherish the love of liberty, or the consolation for the loss of it wherever he goes.

The reader need not be told that we are friends to the spread of liberty: indeed, we think she may "triumph over time, clip his wings, pare his nails, file his teeth, turn back his hour-glass, blunt his scythe, and draw the hobnails out of his shoes;" but to show how this may be done, we must run over a few varieties of liberty for the benefit of such as do not enjoy the inestimable blessings of being free and easy: we quote these words, vulgar as they are; for, of all words in our vernacular tongue, to express comfort and security from ill, commend us to the expletive of free and easy. We had rather not meddle with civil or religious liberty: they are as combustible as the Cotopaxi, or the new governments, of South America; and our attempts at reformation do not extend beyond paper and print, which the unamused reader may burn or not, as he pleases without searing his own conscience or exciting our revenge. To be sure, a few of our examples may border on civil liberty; but we shall not seek to find parallels for the Ptolemaian cages, or the Tower of Famine, in our times; neither shall we feast upon the horrors of the French Revolution, nor the last polite reception of the Russians by headless Turks; notwithstanding all these examples would bear us out in our idea of the love of liberty, and the evils of the loss of it.

Kings often want liberty, even amidst the multitude of their luxuries. They are not unfrequently the veriest slaves at court, and liege and loyal as we are, we seldom hear of a king eating, drinking, and sleeping as other people do, without envying him so happy an interval from the cares of state, and the painted pomp of palaces. This it is that makes the domestic habits of kings so interesting to every one; and many a time have we crossed field after field to catch a glimpse of royalty, in a plain green chariot on the Brighton road, when we would not have put our heads out of window to see a procession to the House of Lords. Some kings have even gone so far in their love of plain life as to drop the king, which is a very pleasant sort of unkingship. Frederick the Great, at one of his literary entertainments adopted this plan to promote free conversation, when he reminded the circle that there was no monarch present, and that every one might think aloud. The conversation soon turned upon the faults of different governments and rulers, and general censures were passing from mouth to mouth pretty freely, when Frederick suddenly stayed the topic, by saying, "Peace, peace, gentlemen, have a care, the king is coming; it may be as well if he does not hear you, lest he should be obliged to be still worse than you." Our Second Charles was very fond of liberty, and of dropping the king, or as some writers say, he never took the office up: this was for another purpose, in times when

Voluntarily parting with one's liberty is, however, very different to having it taken from us, as in the anecdote of the citizen who never having been out of his native place during his lifetime, was, for some offence, sentenced to stay within the walls a whole year; when he died of grief not long afterwards.

State imprisonment is like a set of silken fetters for kings and other great people. Thus, almost all our palaces have been used as prisons, according to the caprice of the monarch, or the violence of the uppermost faction. Shakspeare, in his historical plays, gives us many pictures of royal and noble suffering from the loss of liberty. One of the latter, with a beautiful antidote, is the address of Gaunt to Bolingbroke, after his banishment by Richard II.:—