She bounced by Charybdis, With limestone which ribb'd is; A touch from a pebble might seam her; Made a curtsey to Scylla, As the Turks say, "Bismillah," 'Twas a very close shave for the steamer. But the surges grew brown, And the night hurried down, And they saw in each flash a death-gleamer; While the peals from the clouds, And the wind in the shrouds, Made them all very sick of the steamer. When they made Capri's lights It redoubled their frights, And the friars all bellowed--"Tenemur!" One and all made confessions, (E'en popes have transgressions,) There was some heavy work in the steamer. But they soon smelt the apples And fish-shops of Naples, And the cargo began to esteem her-- "No witch 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."