gantic
mischief. 'Tis then that your first-fiddle is but impertinent
catgut--your fluent organ a vile box of whistles, fit representative of
its _Tube_-al inventor--and the sweetest pipe ever resonant with the
clear, music-breathing air of Italy, or bravely struggling against the
damper atmosphere of our humid isle, sounds harsh and shrilly in our
ears, instead of soothing our "savage breast," which seems to marshal
all its powers the more emphatically to give the poet the lie. This--now
that we are in the confessional--we are free to own--yea, it is
incumbent on us to do ourselves this justice--is only when we are in one
of our unamiable moods, luckily about as rare as snow at mid-summer, but
correspondingly chilling and shocking to the genial ones around
us,--ourselves usually most so, like quiet sunshine in November. We are,
by nature, the meekest of individuals--a "falcon-hearted dove," or
anything else, pretty and poetical, that might give the idea of our
possessing a brave heart under a most gentle exterior; but when roused,
then indeed are we a very dragon; or rather, to keep up our former
simile, (which we think a taking one, though, alas! it is not our own,)
and delineate, by one expressive phrase, a mouldering, rage kept in
check; by the constitutional cowardice on which it is superinduced--then
are we a pigeon-hearted hawk, wanting only the courage to be desperately
cross! (An impertinent friend, who has been looking over our shoulder,
suggests that ourselves, under the two above-named phrases, would be
better adumbrated by the figure of a dish of skimmed milk, and that same
milk curdled! A plague on friends, say we! the most impertinent
impertinencies that fall to our lot in this cross-cornered world are
sure to emanate from them.)

Another of our sins which--to make "a clean breast"--we must confess, is
that of fickleness in our loves; an occasional flirting with other arts
and sciences, in their turn--for we protest against the profligacy of
making love to more than one at once! We string together fearful and
unreadable lengths of iambics, and dactyles, and trochaics, and write
sonnets to the bright queen of night, beginning "O thou!" and stick fast
in the middle of sorely-laboured and at length baffling extempores to
this, that, and t'other; and, wickeder still, then we din them into the
ears of a wretched friend, who having once, in the extremity of his
courtesy, unhappily proved himself a good listener,