Suppose yourself to have spent the first half of a foggy, sleety, chill, moist, melancholy, English winter at some miserable country village in Kent. Suppose about the first of February, while the whole landscape around is still floating in mud, buried in snow, or fast bound by frost, and the atmosphere so thick with fog, that one can scarcely point at mid-day to the spot where the sun stands in the heavens,--that your catarrh grows so alarming, that in a fit of despondency you trundle yourself aboard a ship in the Downs getting under way for a warmer climate. Suppose, that after a smacking run of about eight days before a fresh gale, (during the whole of which you are of course too sick and qualmy to leave your cot,) you awake one morning, and find yourself snugly at anchor in the bay of Funchal; and the romantic, sun-bright mountains of Madeira, gorgeously crested with a mass of brilliant clouds, looking in at your cabin-window. It seems downright enchantment! You leap up as if there was a new soul in your body. You hurry ashore in the first boat. Your cough, lassitude, and qualmishness have altogether left you. Your step is elastic, and your spirits as buoyant as a lark in spring. You luxuriate amidst beautiful gardens glowing with roses, jessamines, honey-suckles, and a thousand other odoriferous shrubs and flowers in full bloom. You wander through a boundless maze of rising vineries curling their budding tendrils around the trellis-work, and terrace above terrace up the declivities of the mountains. You recline among orange-groves bending under the load of ripe golden fruit; and as you stretch yourself at ease by some clear, gurgling rill, in the midst of all this loveliness, you ask yourself, is this a dream--or are these indeed the gardens of the Hesperides? Reader, if you have the blue devils at Christmas, you may realize all this, and reach Madeira, as I have done, in eight days from the Downs. _London Weekly Review._ * * * * * THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF _NEW WORKS_. * * * * * ANECDOTES OF THE FACULTY. _Quacks._