THE PASSENGER.

Not alone in the sea do the men go down in billows.
     I have seen such things on land mid the humhle and the proud.
Men of mark and men of none, and leviathans of commerce
     Go down in calmest weather, in the deep unpitying crowd.
A flutter and a plash, and a short expiring struggle,
     As the great big Ship of Life roars, and steams, and rushes by:
Man overboard? What matters? The paddles roll for ever,—
     'Tis the hand of Fate hath done it. Let him die!

NEW UNCOMMERCIAL SAMPLES.
BY CHARLES DICKENS.

MR. BARLOW.

A GREAT reader of good fiction at an
unusually early age, it seems to me as though
I had been born under the superintendence
of the estimable but terrific gentleman whose
name stands at the head of my present
reflections. The instructive monomaniac,
Mr. Barlow, will be remembered as the
tutor of Master Harry Sandford and Master
Tommy Merton. He knew everything, and
didactically improved all sorts of
occasions, from the consumption of a plate of
cherries to the contemplation of a starlight
night. What youth came to without Mr.
Barlow, was displayed, in the history of
Sandford and Merton, by the example of a
certain awful Master Mash. This young
wretch wore buckles and powder,
conducted himself with insupportable levity
at the theatre, had no idea of facing a mad
bull single-handed (in which I think him
less reprehensible, as remotely reflecting
my own character), and was a frightful
instance of the enervating effects of luxury
upon the human race.

Strange destiny on the part of Mr.
Barlow, to go down to posterity as
childhood's first experience of a Bore!
Immortal Mr. Barlow, boring his way
through the verdant freshness of ages!

My personal indictment against Mr.
Barlow is one of many counts. I will
proceed to set forth a few of the injuries
he has done me.

In the first place, he never made, or
took, a joke. This insensibility on Mr.
Barlow's part not only cast its own
gloom over my boyhood, but blighted
even the sixpenny jest books of the time.
For, groaning under a moral spell
constraining me to refer all things to Mr.
Barlow, I could not choose but ask myself
in a whisper when tickled by a printed
jest, " What would he think of it? What
would he see in it?" The point of the
jest immediately became a sting, and stung
my conscience. For, my mind's eye saw
him stolid, frigid, perchance taking from
its shelf some dreary Greek book and
translating at full length what some dismal
sage said (and touched up afterwards,
perhaps, for publication), when he banished
some unlucky joker from Athens.

The incompatibility of Mr. Barlow with
all other portions of my young life but
himself, the adamantine inadaptability of
the man to my favourite fancies and
amusements, is the thing for which I hate
him most. What right had he to bore his
way into my Arabian Nights? Yet he
did. He was always hinting doubts of the
veracity of Sindbad the Sailor. If he could
have got hold of the Wonderful Lamp, I
knew he would have trimmed it, and
lighted it, and delivered a lecture over it on
the qualities of sperm oil, with a glance at
the whale fisheries. He would so soon have
found out—on mechanical principles—the
peg in the neck of the Enchanted Horse,
and would have turned it the right way in
so workmanlike a manner, that the horse
could never have got any height into the
air, and the story couldn't have been. He
would have proved, by map and compass,
that there was no such kingdom as the
delightful kingdom of Casgar, on the
frontiers of Tartary. He would have caused
that hypocritical young prig, Harry, to
make an experiment—with the aid of a
temporary building in the garden and a
dummy—demonstrating that you couldn't
let a choked Hunchback down an eastern
chimney with a cord, and leave him
upright on the hearth to terrify the Sultan's
purveyor.

The golden sounds of the overture to the
first metropolitan pantomime I remember,
were alloyed by Mr. Barlow. Click click,
ting ting, bang bang, weedle weedle weedle,
Bang! I recall the chilling air that passed
across my frame and cooled my hot delight,
as the thought occurred to me: " This would
never do for Mr. Barlow!" After the curtain
drew up, dreadful doubts of Mr. Barlow's
considering the costumes of the Nymphs
of the Nebula as being sufficiently opaque,
obtruded themselves on my enjoyment. In
the Clown I perceived two persons; one, a
fascinating unaccountable creature of a
hectic complexion, joyous in spirits though
feeble in intellect with flashes of
brilliancy: the other, a pupil for Mr. Barlow.
I thought how Mr. Barlow would secretly
rise early in the morning, and butter the
pavement for him, and, when he had brought