for it, and this little hint, it is quite curious what an interest society may be made to have for you, by your determining to find out the ogres you meet there. What does the man mean? says Mrs. Downright, to whom a joke is a very grave thing. I mean, madam, that in the company assembled in your genteel drawing-room, who bow here and there, and smirk in white neckcloths, you receive men who elbow through life successfully enough, but who are ogres in private: men wicked, false, rapacious, flattering; cruel hectors at home, smiling courtiers abroad; causing wives, children, servants, parents, to tremble before them, and smiling and bowing as they bid strangers welcome into their castles. I say, there are men who have crunched the bones of victim after victim; in whose closets lie skeletons picked frightfully clean. When these ogres come out into the world, you don't suppose they show their knives, and their great teeth? A neat simple white neckcloth, a inerry, rather obsequious manner, a cadaverous look, perhaps, now and again, and a rather dreadful grin; but I know ogres very considerably respected and when you hint to such and such a man, My dear sir, Mr. Sharpus, whom you appear to like, is, I assure you, a most dreadful cannibal;" the gentleman cries, "Oh, psha, nonsense! Dare say not so black as he is painted. Dare say not worse than his neighbors." We condone every thing in this country private treason, falsehood, flattery, cruelty at home, roguery, and double dealing. What! Do you mean to say in your acquaintance you don't know ogres guilty of countless crimes of fraud and force, and that knowing them you don't shake hands with them; dine with them at your table; and meet them at their own? Depend upon it, in the time when there were real live ogres in real caverns or castles, gobbling up real knights and virgins, when they went into the world the neighboring markettown, let us say, or earl's castlethough their nature and reputation were pretty well known, their notorious foibles were never alluded to. You would say, What, Blunderbore, my boy! How do you do? How well and fresh you look! What's the receipt you have for keeping so young and rosy?" And your wife would softly ask after Mrs. Blunderbore and the dear children. Or it would be, My dear Humguffin! try that pork. It is home-bred, home-fed, and, I promise you, tender. Tell me if you think it as good as yours? John, a glass of Burgundy to Colonel Humguffin !" You don't suppose there would be any unpleasant allusions to disagreeable home-reports regarding Humguffin's manner of furnishing his larder? I say we all of us know ogres. We shake hands and dine with ogres. And if inconvenient moralists tell us we are cowards for our pains, we turn round with a tu quoque, or say that we don't meddle with other folk's affairs; that people are much less black than they are painted, and so on. What! Won't half the county go to Ogreham Castle? Won't some of the clergy say grace at dinner? Won't the mothers bring their daughters to dance with the young Rawheads? And if Lady Ogreham happens to die - I won't say to go the way of all flesh, that is too revolting I say if Ogreham is a widower, do you aver, on your conscience and honor, that mothers will not be found to offer their young girls to supply the lamented lady's place? How stale this misanthropy is! Something must have disagreed with this cynic. Yes, my good woman. I dare say you would like to call another subject. Yes, my fine fellow; ogre at home; supple as a dancing-master abroad, and shaking in thy pumps, and wearing a horrible grin of sham gayety to conceal thy terror, lest I should point thee out:- thou art prosperous and honored, art thou? I say thou hast been a tyrant and a robber. Thou | put on the most plausible, nay, piteous hast plundered the poor. Thou hast appearance, in order to inveigle their bullied the weak. Thou hast laid victims. You would read, “Ă tradesviolent hands on the goods of the man, established for seventy years in innocent and confiding. Thou hast the City, and known, and much remade a prey of the meek and spected by Messrs. N. M. Rothschild gentle who asked for thy protection. and Baring Brothers, has pressing Thou hast been hard to thy kinsfolk, need for three pounds until next Satand cruel to thy family. Go, mon- urday. He can give security for half ster! Ah, when shall little Jack come a million, and forty thousand pounds and drill daylight through thy wicked will be given for the use of the loan," cannibal carcass? I see the ogre and so on; or, | "An influential body pass on, bowing right and left to the of capitalists are about to establish a company; and he gives a dreadful company, of which the business will sidelong glance of suspicion as he is be enormous and the profits proportalking to my lord bishop in the cor- tionately prodigious. They will rener there. quire A SECRETARY, of good address Ogres in our days need not be and appearance, at a salary of two giants at all. In former times, and thousand per annum. He need not in children's books, where it is neces- be able to write, but address and sary to paint your moral in such large manners are absolutely necessary. letters that there can be no mistake As a mark of confidence in the comabout it, ogres are made with that pany, he will have to deposit," &c. ; enormous mouth and ratelier which or, "A young widow (of pleasing | you know of, and with which they can manners and appearance) who has a swallow down a baby, almost without pressing necessity for four pounds using that great knife which they ten for three weeks, offers her Erard's always carry. They are too cunning grand piano valued at three hundred now-a-days. They go about in so- guineas; a diamond cross of eight ciety, slim, small, quietly dressed, and hundred pounds; and board and showing no especially great appetite. lodging in her elegant villa near In my own young days there used to Banbury Cross, with the best referbe play ogres men who would ences and society, in return for the devour a young fellow in one sitting, loan." I suspect these people are and leave him without a bit of flesh ogres. There are ogres and ogres. on his bones. They were quiet, gen- Polyphemus was a great, tall, onetlemanlike-looking people. They got eyed, notorious ogre, fetching his the young fellow into their cave. victims out of a hole, and gobbling Champagne pâté-de-foie-gras, and them one after another. There could numberless good things, were handed be no mistake about him. But so about; and then, having eaten, the were the Sirens ogres-pretty blueyoung man was devoured in his turn. eyed things, peeping at you coaxingly I believe these card and dice ogres from out of the water, and singing have died away almost as entirely as their melodious wheedles. And the the hasty-pudding giants whom Tom bones round their caves were more Thumb overcame. Now, there are numerous than the ribs, skulls, and ogres in City courts who lure you thigh-bones round the cavern of into their dens. About our Cornish | hulking Polypheme. mines I am told there are many most plausible ogres, who tempt you into their caverns, and pick your bones there. In a certain newspaper there used to be lately a whole column of advertisements from ogres who would To the castle-gates of some of these monsters up rides the dapper champion of the pen; puffs boldly upon the horn which hangs by the chain; enters the hall resolutely, and challenges the big tyrant sulking within. We defy him to combat, the enormous roaring ruffian! We give him a meeting on the green plain before his castle. Green? No wonder it should be green it is manured with human bones. After a few graceful wheels and curvets, we take our ground. We stoop over our saddle. 'Tis but to kiss the locket of our lady-love's hair. And now the visor is up: the lance is in rest (Gillott's iron is the point for me). A touch of the spur in the gallant sides of Pegasus, and we gallop at the great brute. "Cut off his ugly head, Flibbertygibbet, my squire ! And who are these who pour out of the castle? the imprisoned maidens, the maltreated widows, the poor old hoary grandfathers, who have been locked up in the dungeons these scores and scores of years, writhing under the tyranny of that ruffian! Ah ye knights of the pen! May honor be your shield, and truth tip your lances! Be gentle to all gentle people. Be modest to women. Be tender to children. And as for the Ogre Humbug, out sword, and have at him. that some of the best actions we have all of us committed in our lives have been committed in fancy. It is not all wickedness we are thinking, que diable! Some of our thoughts are bad enough, I grant you. Many a one you and I have had here below. Ah, mercy, what a monster! what crooked horns! what leering eyes! what a flaming mouth! what cloven feet, and what a hideous writhing tail! Oh, let us fall down on our knees, repeat our most potent exorcisms, and overcome the brute. Spread your black pinions, fly-fly to the dusky realms of Eblis, and bury thyself under the pavingstones of his hall, dark genie! But all thoughts are not so. No no. There are the pure: there are the kind: there are the gentle. There are sweet unspoken thanks before a fair scene of nature: at a sun-setting below a glorious sea; or a moon and a host of stars shining over it; at a bunch of children playing in the street, or a group of flowers by the hedge-side, or a bird singing there. At a hundred moments or occurrences of the day good thoughts pass through the mind, let us trust, which never are spoken; prayers are made which never are said; and Te Deum is sung without church, clerk, choristers, parWhy, there's my enemy: who got the place I wanted; who maligned me to the woman I We have all heard of a place paved wanted to be well with; who supwith good intentions: -a place planted me in the good graces of my which I take to be a very dismal, use- patron. I don't say any thing about less and unsatisfactory terminus for the matter: but, my poor old enemy, many pleasant thoughts, kindly fan-in my secret mind I have movements cies, gentle wishes, merry little quips and pranks, harmless jokes which die as it were the moment of their birth. Poor little children of the brain! He was a dreary theologian who huddled you under such a melancholy cenotaph, and laid you in the vaults under the flagstones of Hades! I trust *The following paper was written in 1861, after the extraordinary affray be tween Major Murray and the money-lender in a house in Northumberland Street, Strand, and subsequent to the appearance ON TWO ROUNDABOUT PA- of M. Du Chaillu's book on Gorillas. of as tender charity towards you, you ་ of the room! Our friends hustle round | twenty lines past, under a vast gusty us. Capulet and Montague are not awning, now with twenty thousand more at odds than the houses of fellow-citizens looking on from the Roundabout and Wrightabout, let us benches, now in the circus itself, a say. It is, "My dear Mrs. Buffer, do grim gladiator with sword and net, or kindly put yourself in the chair be- a meek martyr was I?-brought tween those two men!" Or, "My out to be gobbled up by the lions? or dear Wrightabout, will you take that a huge, shaggy, tawny lion myself, charming Lady Blancmange down to on whom the dogs were going to be supper? She adores your poems; set? What a day of excitement I and gave five shillings for your auto- have had to be sure! But I must graph at the fancy fair.' In like get away from Verona, or who knows inanner the peace-makers gather how much farther the Roundabout round Roundabout on his part; he Pegasus may carry me? is carried to a distant corner, and coaxed out of the way of the enemy with whom he is at feud. " We were saying, my Muse, before we dropped and perched on earth for a couple of sentences, that our unsaid words were in some limbo or other, as real as those we have uttered; that the thoughts which have passed through our brains are as actual as any to which our tongues and pens have given currency. For instance, besides what is here hinted at, I have thought ever so much more about Verona: about an early Christian church I saw there; about a great dish of rice we had at the inn; about the bugs there; about ever so many more details of that day's journey from Milan to Venice; about lake Garda, which lay on the way from Milan, and so forth. I say what fine things we have thought of, haven't we, all of us? Ah, what a fine tragedy that was I thought of, and never wrote! the day of the dinner of the Oystermongers' Company, what a noble speech I thought of in the cab, and broke down-I don't mean the cab, but the speech. Ah, if you could but read some of the unwritten Roundabout Papers-how you would be amused! Aha! my friend, I catch you saying, "Well, then, I wish this was unwritten with all my heart. Very good. I owe you one. I do confess a hit, a palpable hit. On When we meet in the Square at Verona, out flash rapiers, and we fall to. But in his private mind Tybalt owns that Mercutio has a rare wit, and Mercutio is sure that his adversary is a gallant gentleman. Look at the amphitheatre yonder. You do not suppose those gladiators who fought and perished, as hundreds of spectators in that grim Circus held thumbs down, and cried, "Kill, kill!" you do not suppose the combatants of necessity hated each other? No more than the celebrated trained bands of literary sword-and-buckler men hate the adversaries whom they meet in the arena. They engage at the given signal; feint and parry; slash, poke, rip each other open, dismember limbs, and hew off noses: but in the way of business, and, I trust, with mutual private esteem. For instance, I salute the warriors of the Superfine Company with the honors due among warriors. Here's at you, Spartacus, my lad. A hit, I acknowledge. A palpable hit! Ha! how do you like that poke in the eye in return? When the trumpets sing truce, or the spectators are tired, we bow to the noble company: withdraw; and get a cool glass of wine in One day in the past month, as I our rendezvous des braves gladiateurs. was reclining on the bench of thought, By the way, I saw that amphithea-with that ocean "The Times" newstre of Verona under the strange light paper spread before me, the ocean cast of a lurid eclipse some years ago; and up on the shore at my feet two famous I have been there in spirit for these subjects for Roundabout Papers, and } I picked up those waifs, and treasured | Pirate-ships? Why not? What a them away until I could polish them cavern of terror was this in Northumand bring them to market. That berland Street, with its splendid furscheme is not to be carried out. Initure covered with dust, its empty can't write about those subjects. And bottles, in the midst of which sits a though I cannot write about them, I grim "agent," amusing himself by may surely tell what are the subjects firing pistols, aiming at the unconI am going not to write about. scious mantelpiece, or at the heads of his customers! The first was that Northumberland Street encounter, which all the papers have narrated. Have any novelists of our days a scene and catastrophe more strange and terrible than this which occurs at noonday within a few yards of the greatest thoroughfare in Europe? At the theatres they have a new name for their melodramatic pieces, and call them "Sensation Dramas." What a sensation Drama this is! What have people been flocking to see at the Adelphi Theatre for the last hundred and fifty nights? A woman pitched overboard out of a boat, and a certain Miles taking a tremendous "header," and bringing her to shore? Bagatelle! What is this compared to the real life-drama, of which a mid-day representation takes place just opposite the Adelphi in Northumberland Street? The brave Dumas, the intrepid Ainsworth, the terrible Eugene Sue, the cold-shudder-inspiring "Woman in White," the astounding author of the "Mysteries of the Court of London," never invented any thing more tremendous than this. It might have happened to you and me. We want to borrow a little money. We are directed to an agent. We propose a pecuniary transaction at a short date. He goes into the next room, as we fancy, to get the bank-notes, and returns with "two very pretty, delicate little ivory-handled pistols," and blows a portion of our heads off. After this, what is the use of being squeamish about the probabilities and possibilities in the writing of fiction? Years ago I remember making merry over a play of Dumas, called Kean, in which the" Coal-Hole Tavern " was represented on the Thames, with a fleet of pirate-ships moored alongside. After this, what is not possible? It is possible Hungerford Market is mined, and will explode some day. Mind how you go in for a penny ice unawares. Pray, step this way," says a quiet person at the door. You enter into a back room :- a quiet room; rather a dark room. Pray, take your place in a chair." And she goes to fetch the penny ice. Malheureux! The chair sinks down with you sinks, and sinks, and sinks a large wet flannel suddenly envelops your face and throttles you. Need we say any more? After Northumberland Street, what is improbable? Surely there is no difficulty in crediting Bluebeard. I withdraw my last month's opinions about ogres. Ogres? Why not? I protest I have seldom contemplated any thing more terribly ludicrous than this "agent" in the dingy splendor of his den, surrounded by dusty ormolu and piles of empty bottles, firing pistols for his diversion at the mantelpiece until his clients come in! pistol-practice so common in Northumberland Street, that it passes without notice in the lodging-houses there? Is We spake anon of good thoughts. About bad thoughts? Is there some Northumberland Street chamber in your heart and mine, friend: close to the every-day street of life: visited by daily friends: visited by people on business; in which affairs are transacted; jokes are uttered; wine is drunk; through which people come and go; wives and children pass; and in which murder sits unseen until the terrible moment when he rises up and kills? A farmer, say, has a gun over the mantelpicce |