itch in a sieve,
They could ever believe,
Had sailed half so fast as the steamer."

Could my pen give a sketch
Of each wo-begone wretch,
Like Gilray, H. B., or old Damer,
You should have the whole troop
That lay stretched on the poop,
As up by the mole dashed the steamer.

Were I Guizot, or Florian,
Or "Oxford Historian,"
Or "Orator" like Dr Cremer,
In my grand paragraphs,
You should have all the laughs
Of the mob as they rushed from the steamer!

LETTERS ON THE TRUTHS CONTAINED IN POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.

II.--VAMPYRISM.

Dear Archy,--In acknowledging my former letter, you express an eager
desire to learn, as you phrase it, "all about vampyrs, if there ever
were such things." I will not delay satisfying your curiosity, wondering
only how my friend, your late tutor, Mr H., should have left you in a
state of uncertainty upon a point on which, in my time, schoolboys many
years your juniors had fully made up their minds.

"Were there ever such things as vampyrs?" _tantamne rem tam
negligenter?_ I turn to the learned pages of Horst for a luminous and
precise definition of the destructive and mysterious beings, whose
existence you have ventured to consider problematical.

"A vampyr is a dead body, which continues to live in the grave, which it
leaves, however, by night, for the purpose of sucking the blood of the
living, whereby it is nourished, and preserved in good condition,
instead of becoming decomposed like other dead bodies."

Upon my word, you really deserve--Since Mr George Combe has clearly
shown in his admirable work "On the Constitution of Man, and its
adaptation to the world around him," that ignorance is a statutable
crime before Nature, and punishable, and punished by the laws of
Providence,--you deserve, I say, unless you contrive to make Mr H. your
substitute, which I think would be just, yourself to be the subject of
the nocturnal visit of a vampyr. Your scepticism will abate pretty
considerably, when you see him stealthily entering your room, yet are
powerless under the fascination of his fixed and leaden eye--when you
are conscious, as you lie motionless with terror, of his nearer and
nearer approach,--when you feel his face, fresh with the smell of the
grave, bent over your throat, while his keen teeth make a fine incision
in your jugular, preparatively to his commencing his plain, but
nutritive repast.

Y