organ, which float far and wide over the
valley.

And Ilse, as she glides along, learns to forget
her fear of the witches on the Brocken.
She will even venture to play Princess Boiling
in the kettles of the pleasure-seekers who go
to drink coffee on the greensward of the
valley, and the only tribute she demands is,
that all who enjoy the privilege of making
tea or coffee in the fresh air from her waters
leave one or two morsels of sweet-biscuit as
a fee due to the wood-mouse.

This story does not wish to follow little
Ilse into the flat country, where she meets
the Ocker and the Ecker, and afterwards the
Aller, and is borne by them onwards to the Old
Weser, who carries Ocker and Ecker and Aller
and all into the open Sea, which is of all waters
the first in rank, and lowest in position.

LITERAL CLAIMS.

HAD Homer lived at the present day, he
would have suppressed one of his famous
epithets—an epithet as admirable as his
poluphloisboio, were it only half as true.
Homer speaks of mankind, in the genitive
case as meropoon anthroopoon. The printer
need not trouble to put these words into
Greek characters, because all that the word
meropoon means to say is, that men are a
distinctly or a dividedly-speaking race. Learned
commentators on the above phrase explain
its force by remarking that brutes are capable
of uttering vowels only—consonants being an
elocutionary achievement which they are
incapable of executing. Of course, birds that
have been taught to imitate human speech
do not upset the general theory. The cow
says "o-o-o;" the sheep says "a-a-a;" the
cat says "eou;" and the dog barks "ou-ou."
The labial consonants prefixed by the popular
version of mo, ba, meou, bow-wow, are
merely the accidental parting of the lips
when the respective beasts open their mouths
to address the public. When once the lips
are opened, and their proprietors have begun
to say their say, they continue their
allocution in vowels; and, to vowels alone they
are restricted.

Homer would hardly allow the modern
English to be meropoon, nationally speaking.
Certainly not, if he were a good English
scholar himself. Although he would be too
reasonable to expect Britons (with the
exception of the Highlanders, who have Gaelic
for their mother-tongue,) to give the
guttural utterance of the Greek X, chi, or to be
quite clear how the digamma was sounded,
it would have made his flesh crawl on his
bones to hear his great poem spoken of as
Omer's Hiliad, or to listen to the specimen
of a fashionable rhapsodist who should undertake
to read the Odyssey in the Tyburnian
style of, "The oarse wough towwent wushes
woaming by." Distinctness will not be
utterly banished from the land so long as the
Queen and Fanny Kemble are left to us; but
the million stand greatly in need of the
Demosthenic discipline of sea-side oratorical
practice with a mouthful of pebbles to act as
dumb-bells for the development of their
lingual powers.

There is a grammatical rule touching the
gender of nouns, which is allowed to be
infringed with impunity, by attributing the
qualities of sex to objects which, in strict
truth, can have none. Thus, virtue, the moon,
and a ship, are made feminine; "she is her
own reward," "she fills her horns," and "she
is a good sailer." Imagination is even allowed
to go further than that; inanimate things,
implements made for our use, are permitted
to remonstrate in their own person, when we
treat them unjustly and pervert them from
their legitimate employments. Thus, sundry
letters have lately raised the voice of
complaint, each one considering himself the
most ill-used member of the alphabet. The
clever author of P's and Q's (well worth
national perusal), has thrown his soul into the
suffering carcase of poor letter H, and made
it utter most tragical mirth; while letter R
conceives he has no right to do the work of
letter W, in cases such as when "poor fellers
swaller poison, which they had better have
thrown out of the winder."

Letter H, in addressing his Dear Little
Vowels, a, e, i, o, and u, reminds them that
he has long held a very useful and honourable
place in the family of letters; that his
special office has been to put himself at the
head of the said vowels, to the end that people
might know how to call them; that, though
sometimes he has most honourable aspirations
to be first and foremost, at other times
he is so humble that he only wants to let his
next little brother speak, and does not wish
any one to take the least notice of him; that
he has heard both himself and his little
friends talked about so much and called such
curious names, that he could bear it no
longer; that a little prattling child told his
mamma that he had 'urt his 'and, and to his
(H's) great surprise, his mother did not ask
him what he meant; that a person who was
very well dressed, and looked like a lady,
asked a gentleman, who was sitting by her, if
he knew whether Lord Mumble had left any
Heir behind him; that the gentleman blushed
and stopped a little, to think whether the
lady meant a son or a hare; that his nerves
received a fearful shock from hearing an old
gentleman read aloud from his newspaper
something about the Russians and the Hottoman
Hempire; that an attendant in a
music-shop, when a lady had forgotten
the name of a song she wanted, suggested
that she should 'um the hair; that a
democratic statesman told his brother
politicians to hagitate, hagitate, hagitate,
till they had gained their hobject; that a
person while dining, actually told his servant