which may be worthy of _noting_:

"In concluding, I cannot help remarking that this circuit of the wind
from SW. by W. to NW. or N., from our insular position, imparts to our
climate its fickleness and inconstancy. How often will our brightest
sky become suffused by the blackest vapours on the slightest breach of
SW. wind, and the clouds will then disappear as speedily as they
formed, when the NW. upper current forces their stratum of moist air to
rise and mingle with the dryer current above. I do not know who first
noticed and recorded this change of the wind from SW. to NW., but the
regularity of the phenomenon must teach us that the law which it obeys
is part of a grand system, and invites us to trace its action. I do not
think it will be out of place to point out the fact that the great
English poet seems to have been quite familiar with this feature of our
weather, not only in its most striking manifestations in the autumn and
winter months, to which he especially refers, but even in its more
pleasant aspects of summer. Shakspeare likens the wind in this shifting
to an individual who pays his addresses in succession to two fair
ones--first he wooes the North, but in courting that frigid beauty a
difference takes place, whereupon he turns his back upon her and courts
the fair South. You will observe the lines are specially applied to the
winter season--

'And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the _north_,
And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,
Turning this _face_ to the dew-dropping _south_.'

--I am not aware that the philosophic truth contained in these lines
has ever before been pointed out. The beautiful lines which the poet,
in his prodigality, put into the mouth of one of his gay frolicsome
characters, the meaning of them he no doubt thought might have been
understood by every one; but his commentators do not seem to have done
so. In some editions turning his _side_ has been put for _face_, which
is feeble and unmeaning. And I do not think the recent emendation by
Mr. Collier on the text is any improvement, where _tide_ is substituted
for _face_, which impairs both the beauty and harmony of the metaphor."

ANON.

* * * * *

_A Word for "the Old Corrector."_--Allow me, as an avowed enemy to "the Old