than time. His march is straightforward; but we should have
leisure allowed us to look back upon the distance we have come, and
not be counting his steps every moment. Time in Holland is a foolish
old fellow with all the antics of a youth, who "goes to church in a
coranto, and lights his pipe in a cinque-pace." The chimes with us, on
the contrary, as they come in every three or four hours, are like
stages in the journey of the day. They give a fillip to the lazy,
creeping hours, and relieve the lassitude of country-places. At noon,
their desultory, trivial song is diffused through the hamlet with the
odour of rashers of bacon; at the close of day they send the toil-worn
sleepers to their beds. Their discontinuance would be a great loss to
the thinking or unthinking public. Mr. Wordsworth has painted their
effect on the mind when he makes his friend Matthew, in a fit of
inspired dotage,

"Sing those witty rhymes
About the crazy old church-clock
And the bewilder'd chimes."

The tolling of the bell for deaths and executions is a fearful
summons, though, as it announces, not the advance of time but the
approach of fate, it happily makes no part of our subject. Otherwise,
the "sound of the bell" for Macheath's execution in the "Beggar's
Opera," or for that of the Conspirators in "Venice Preserved," with
the roll of the drum at a soldier's funeral, and a digression to that
of my Uncle Toby, as it is so finely described by Sterne, would
furnish ample topics to descant upon. If I were a moralist, I might
disapprove the ringing in the new and ringing out the old year.

'Why dance ye, mortals, o'er the grave of Time?'

St. Paul's bell tolls only for the death of our English kings, or a
distinguished personage or two, with long intervals between.[38]

[Footnote 38: Rousseau has admirably described the effect of bells on
the imagination in a passage in the Confessions, beginning "_Le son
des cloches m'a toujours singulierement affecte_," &c.]

Those who have no artificial means of ascertaining the progress of
time, are in general the most acute in discerning its immediate signs,
and are most retentive of individual dates. The mechanical aids to
knowledge are not sharpeners of the wits. The understanding of a
savage is a kind of natural almanac, and more true in its
prognostication of the future. In his mind's eye he sees what has
happened or what is likely to happen to him, "as in a map the voyager
his cours