Have you, our dear Doctor, no compassion for those unfortunate blades, who, nolentesvolentes, must remain out perennially all night -we mean the blades of grass, and also the flowers? Their constitutions seem often far from strong; and shut your eyes on a frosty night, and you will hear them-we have done so many million times-shivering, ay, absolutely shivering under their coat of hoar-frost! If the night air be indeed what Dr. Kitchiner has declared it to be-Lord have mercy on the vegetable world! What agonies in that field of turnips! Alas, poor Swedes! The imagination recoils from the condition of that club of winter cabbages-and of what materials, pray, must the heart of that man be made, who could think but for a moment on the case of those carrots, without bursting into a flood of tears!

lack of vigour attendant on the loss of sleep, his mouth so deranged by tippling that he which is as enfeebling and as distressing as simultaneously snorts, stutters, slavers and the languor that attends the want of food," snores-pot-bellied-shanked like a spindlethey are, to use a homely Scotch expression, strae-and bidding fair to be buried on or be"neither to haud nor bind;" the eyes of the fore Saturday week ;-Be it a half-drunk horseyoung lads being all as brisk, bold, and bright cowper, swinging to and fro in a wraprascal as the stars in Charles's Wain, while those of on a bit of broken-down blood that once won the young lasses shine with a soft, faint, ob- a fifty, every sentence, however short, having scure, but beautiful lustre, like the dewy but two intelligible words, an oath and a liePleiades, over which nature has insensibly his heart rotten with falsehood, and his bowels been breathing a mist almost waving and burned up with brandy, so that sudden death wavering into a veil of clouds! may pull him from his saddle before he put spurs to his sporting filly that she may bilk the turnpike man, and carry him more speedily home to beat or murder his poor, pale, industrious char-woman of a wife;-Be it-not a beggar, for beggars are prohibited from this parish-but a pauper in the sulks, dying on her pittance from the poor-rates, which altogether amount in merry England but to about the paltry sum of, more or less, six millions a year-her son, all the while, being in a thriv ing way as a general merchant in the capital of the parish, and with clear profits from his business of £300 per annum, yet suffering the mother that bore him, and suckled him, and washed his childish hands, and_combed the bumpkin's hair, and gave him Epsoms in a cup when her dear Johnny-raw had the bellyache, to go down, step by step, as surely and as obviously as one is seen going down a stair with a feeble hold of the banisters, and stumbling every footfall, down that other flight of steps that consist of flags that are mortal damp and mortal cold, and lead to nothing but a parcel of rotten planks, and overhead a vault dripping with perpetual moisture, green and slobbery, such as toads delight in crawling heavily through with now and then a bloated leap, and hideous things more worm-like, that go wriggling briskly in and out among the refuse of the coffins, and are heard, by imagination at least, to emit faint angry sounds, because the light of day has hurt their eyes, and the air from the upper world weakened the rank savoury smell of corruption, clothing, as with a pall, all the inside walls of the tombs ;-Be it a man yet in the prime of life as to years, six feet and an inch high, and measuring round the chest forty-eight inches, (which is more, reader, than thou dost by six, we bet a sovereign, member although thou even be'st of the Edinburgh Six Feet Club,) to whom Washington Irving's Jack Tibbuts was but a Tims-but then ever so many gamekeepers met him all alone in my lord's pheasant preserve, and though two of them died within the month, two within the year, and two are now in the workhouse-one a mere idiot, and the other a madman-both shadows

The Doctor avers that the firm health and fine spirits of persons who live in the country, are not more from breathing a purer air, than from enjoying plenty of sound sleep; and the most distressing misery of "this Elysium of bricks and mortar," is the rareness with which we enjoy "the sweets of a slumber unbroke." Doctor in the first place, it is somewhat doubtful whether or not persons who live in the country have firmer health and finer spirits than persons who live in towns-even in London. What kind of persons do you mean? You must not be allowed to select some dozen or two of the hairiest among the curates-a few chosen rectors whose faces have been but lately elevated to the purple-a team of prebends issuing sleek from their golden stallsa picked bishop-a sacred band the élite of the squirearchy-with a corresponding sprinkling of superior noblemen from lords to dukes and then to compare them, cheek by jowl, with an equal number of external objects taken from the common run of Cockneys. This, Doctor, is manifestly what you are ettling atbut you must clap your hand, Doctor, without discrimination, on the great body of the rural population of England, male and female, and take whatever comes first-be it a poor, wrinkled, toothless, blear-eyed, palsied hag, tottering horizontally on a staff, under the load of a premature old age, (for she is not yet fifty,) brought on by annual rheumatism and perennial poverty-Be it a young, ugly, unmarried woman, far advanced in pregnancy, and sullenly trooping to the alehouse, to meet the overseer of the parish poor, who, enraged with the unborn bastard, is about to force the parish bally to marry the parish prostitute;-Be it a landlord of a rural inn, with pig eyes peering over his ruby cheeks, the whole machinery of

so terribly were their bodies mauled, and so sorely were their skulls fractured;—yet the poacher was taken, tried, hulked; and there he sits now, sunning himself on a bank by the edge of a wood whose haunts he must thread no more-for the keepers were grim bonebreakers enough in their way-and when they had gotten him on his back, one gouged him like a Yankee, and the other bit off his nose like a Bolton Trotter-and one smashed his os frontis with the nailed heel of a two-pound

and yet herself thoughtless of the coming doom, and cheerful as a nest-building birdwhile her lover, too deep in despair to be be

each successive day feels the dear and dreadful burden lighter and lighter in his arms. Small strength will it need to support her bier! The coffin, as if empty, will be lowered unfelt by the hands that hold those rueful cords!

wooden clog, a Preston Purrer;-so that Master | pectation of the Tailor who played the princiAllonby is now far from being a beauty, with pal part-and sense, feeling, memory, imaginaa face of that description attached to a head tion, and reason, were all felled by one blow wagging from side to side under a powerful of fear-as butcher felleth ox-while by one palsy, while the Mandarin drinks damnation of those mysteries, which neither we, nor you, to the Lord of the Manor in a horn of eleemo- nor anybody else, can understand, life resynary ale, handed to him by the village black-mained not only unimpaired, but even insmith, in days of old not the worst of the gang, vigorated; and there she sits, like a clock and who, but for a stupid jury, a merciful wound up to go a certain time, the machinery judge, and something like prevarication in the of which being good, has not been altogether circumstantial evidence, would have been deranged by the shock that sorely cracked the hanged for a murderer-as he was-dissected, case, and will work till the chain is run down, and and hung in chains;-Be it a red-haired wo- then it will tick no more;-Be it that tall, fair, man, with a pug nose, small fiery eyes, high lovely girl, so thin and attenuated that all wonder cheekbones, bulging lips, and teeth like swine- she can walk by herself that she is not blown tusks,-bearded-flat-breasted as a man-tall, away even by the gentle summer breeze that scambling in her gait, but swift, and full of wooes the hectic of her cheek-dying all see wild motions in her weather-withered arms, all-and none better than her poor old motherstarting with sinews like whipcord-the Pedestrian Post to and fro the market town twelve miles off and so powerful a pugilist that she hit Grace Maddox senseless in seven minutes-trayed into tears, as he carries her to her couch, tried before she was eighteen for child-murder, but not hanged, although the man-child, of which the drab was self-delivered in a ditch, was found with blue finger-marks on its windpipe, bloody mouth, and eyes forced out of their sockets, buried in the dunghill behind her father's hut-not hanged, because a surgeon, originally bred a sow-gelder, swore that he believed the mother had unconsciously destroyed her offspring in the throes of travail, if indeed it had ever breathed, for the lungs would not swim, he swore, in a basin of water-so the incestuous murderess was let loose; her brother got hanged in due time after the mutiny at the Nore-and her father, the fishmonger-why, he went red raving mad as if a dog had bitten him—and died, as the same surgeon and sowgelder averred, of the hydrophobia, foaming at the mouth, gnashing his teeth, and some said cursing, but that was a calumny, for something seemed to be the matter with his tongue, and he could not speak, only splutter-nobody venturing, except his amiable daughter-and in that particular act of filial affection she was amiable to hold in the article of death the old man's head;-Be it that moping idiot that would sit, were she suffered, on, on, on-night and day for ever, on the selfsame spot, whatever that spot might be on which she happened to squat at morning, mound, wall, or stone-motionless, dumb, and, as a stranger would think, also blind, for the eyelids are still shut-never opened in sun or storm;-yet that figure that which is now, and has for years been, an utter and hopeless idiot, was once a gay, laughing, dancing, singing girl, whose blue eyes seemed full of light, whether they looked on earth or heaven, the flowers or the stars-her sweet-heart-a rational young man, it would appear-having leapt out upon her suddenly, as she was passing through the churchyard at night, from behind a tomb-stone in a sack which she, having little time for consideration, and being naturally superstitious, supposed to be a shroud, and the wearer thereof, who was an active stripling of sound flesh and blood, to be a ghost or skeleton, all one horrid rattle of bones; so that the trick succeeded far beyond the most sanguine ex

In mercy to our readers and ourselves, we shall endeavour to prevent ourselves from pursuing this argument any further-and perhaps quite enough has been said to show that Dr. Kitchiner's assertion, that persons who live in the country have firmer health and finer spirits than the inhabitants of towns-is exceedingly problematical. But even admitting the fact to be as the Doctor has stated it, we do not think he has attributed the phenomenon to the right cause. He attributes it to "their enjoying plenty of sound sleep." The worthy Doctor is entirely out in his conjecture. The working classes in the country enjoy, we don't doubt it, sound sleep-but not plenty of it. They have but a short allowance of sleep-and whether it be sound or not, depends chiefly on themselves; while as to the noises in towns and cities, they are nothing to what one hears in the country-unless, indeed, you perversely prefer private lodgings at a pewterer's. Did we wish to be personal, we could name a single waterfall who, even in dry weather, keeps all the visiters from town awake within a circle of four miles diameter; and in wet weather, not only keeps them all awake, but impresses them with a constantly recurring conviction during the hours of night, that there is some thing seriously amiss about the foundation of the river, and that the whole parish is about to be overflowed, up to the battlements of the old castle that overlooks the linn. Then, on another point, we are certain-namely, that rural thunder is many hundred times more powerful than villatic. London porter is above admiration-but London thunder below contempt. An ordinary hackney-coach beats it hollow. But, my faith! a thunder-storm in the country-especially if it be mountainous, with a few fine Woods and Forests, makes you inevitably think of that land from whose bourne no traveller returns; and even our town readers will acknowledge that country thunder much more frequently proves mortal than the

thunder you meet with in cities. In the coun- | him, who had sat all day with his feet on the try, few thunder-storms are contented to pass fender, to gobble up, at six o'clock of the over without killing at least one horse, some afternoon, as enormous a dinner as we who milch-kine, half-a-dozen sucking pigs or tur- had walked since sunrise forty or fifty miles? keys, an old woman or two, perhaps the Minis- Because our stimulus had been greater, was ter of the parish, a man about forty, name our nourishment to be less? We don't care a unknown, and a nursing mother at the ingle, curse about stimulus. What we want, in such the child escaping with singed eye-brows, and a case, is lots of fresh food; and we hold that, a singular black mark on one of its great toes. under such circumstances, a man with a sound We say nothing of the numbers stupified, who Tory Church-and-King stomach and constituawake the day after, as from a dream, with tion cannot over-eat himself-no, not for his strange pains in their heads, and not altogether immortal soul. sure about the names or countenances of the We had almost forgot to take the deceased somewhat unaccountable people whom they Doctor to task for one of the most free-andsee variously employed about the premises, easy suggestions ever made to the ill-disposed, and making themselves pretty much at home. how to disturb and destroy the domestic happiIn towns, not one thunder-storm in fifty that ness of eminent literary characters. "An performs an exploit more magnanimous than introduction to eminent authors may be obknocking down an old wife from a chimney-tained," quoth he slyly, "from the booksellers top-singeing a pair of worsted stockings that, knit in an ill-starr'd hour, when the sun had entered Aries, had been hung out to dry on a line in the back-yard, or garden as it is called -or cutting a few inches off the tail of an old whig weathercock that for years had been pecking the eyes out of all the airts the wind can blaw, greedy of some still higher prefer

ment.

Our dear deceased author proceeds to tell his Traveller how to eat and drink; and remarks, "that people are apt to imagine that they may indulge a little more in high living when on a journey. Travelling itself, however, acts as a stimulus; therefore less nourishment is required than in a state of rest. What you might not consider intemperate at home, may occasion violent irritation, fatal inflammations, &c., in situations where you are least able to obtain medical assistance."

who publish their works."

The booksellers who publish the works of eminent authors have rather more common sense and feeling, it is to be hoped, than this comes to-and know better what is the province of their profession. Any one man may, if he chooses, give any other man an introduction to any third man in this world. Thus the tailor of any eminent author-or his bookseller-or his parish minister-or his butcher or his baker-or his "man of business"or his house-builder-may, one and all, give such travellers as Dr. Kitchiner and others, letters of introduction to the said eminent author in prose or verse. This, we have heard, is sometimes done-but fortunately we cannot speak from experience, not being ourselves an eminent author. The more general the intercourse between men of taste, feeling, cultivation, learning, genius, the better; but that All this is very loosely stated, and must be intercourse should be brought about freely and set to rights. If you shut yourself up for of its own accord, as fortunate circumstances some fifty hours or so in a mail-coach, that permit, and there should be no impertinent keeps wheeling along at the rate of ten miles interference of selfish or benevolent go-bean hour, and changes horses in half a minute, tweens. It would seem that Dr. Kitchiner certainly for obvious reasons the less you eat thought the commonest traveller, one who was and drink the better; and perhaps an hourly almost, as it were, bordering on a Bagman, had hundred drops of laudanum, or equivalent nothing to do but call on the publisher of any grain of opium, would be advisable, so that the great writer, and get a free admission into his transit from London to Edinburgh might be house. Had the Doctor not been dead, we performed in a phantasma. But the free agent should have given him a severe rowing and ought to live well on his travels-some degrees blowing-up for this vulgar folly; but as he is better, without doubt, than when at home. dead, we have only to hope that the readers of People seldom live very well at home. There the Oracle who intend to travel will not degrade is always something requiring to be eaten up, themselves, and disgust "authors of emithat it may not be lost, which destroys the nence," by thrusting their ugly or comely faces soothing and satisfactory symmetry of an un--both are equally odious-into the privacy of exceptionable dinner. We have detected the gentlemen who have done nothing to exclude same duck through many unprincipled dis-themselves from the protection of the laws of guises, playing a different part in the farce of domestic economy, with a versatility hardly to have been expected in one of the most generally despised of the web-footed tribe. When travelling at one's own sweet will, one feeds at a different inn every meal; and, except when the coincidence of circumstances is against you, there is an agreeable variety both in the natural and artificial disposition of the dishes. True that travelling may act as a HAVING thus briefly instructed travellers how stimulus-but false that therefore less nourish- to get a look at Lions, the Doctor suddenly ex ment is required. Would Dr. Kitchiner, if claims-"IMPRIMIS, BEWARE OF DOGS!" "There now alive, presume to say that it was right for have," he says, "been many arguments, pro

civilized society-or subject their firesides to be infested by one-half of the curious men of the country, two-thirds of the clever, and all the blockheads.

THIRD COURSE.

vincial town, would have found refuge under the gateway of the Hen and Chickens.

"The life of the most humble human being." quoth the Doctor, "is of more value than all the dogs in the world-dare the most brutal cynic say otherwise?”

This question is not put to us; for so far from being the most brutal Cynic, we do not belong to the Cynic school at all-being an Eclectic, and our philosophy composed chiefly of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Peripateticism

and con, on the dreadful disease their bite pro- | with stiles or turnpikes-metropolitan streets duces it is enough to prove that multitudes and suburban paths-and at all seasons of the of men, women, and children have died in revolving year and day; but never, as we padconsequence of having been bitten by dogs. ded the hoof along, met we nor were overtaken What does it matter whether they were the by greyhound, mastiff, or cur, in a state of hyvictims of bodily disease or mental irritation? drophobia. We have many million times seen The life of the most humble human being is them with their tongues lolling out about a of more value than all the dogs in the world-yard-their sides pating-flag struck-and the dare the most brutal cynic say otherwise?" whole dog showing symptoms of severe disDr. Kitchiner always travelled, it appears, tress. That such travellers were not mad, we in chaises; and a chaise of one kind or other do not assert-they may have been mad-but he recommends to all his brethren of man- they certainly were fatigued; and the differkind. Why, then, this intense fear of the ence, we hope, is often considerable between canine species? Who ever saw a mad dog weariness and insanity. Dr. Kitchiner, had he leap into the mail-coach, or even a gig? The seen such dogs as we have seen, would have creature, when so afflicted, hangs his head, fainted on the spot. He would have raised and goes snapping right and left at pedestrians. the country against the harmless jog-trotter. Poor people like us, who must walk, may well Pitchforks would have gleamed in the setting fear hydrophobia-though, thank Heaven, we sun, and the flower of the agricultural youth have never, during the course of a tolerably of a midland country, forming a levy en masse, long and well-spent life, been so much as once would have offered battle to a turnspit. The bitten by "the rabid animal!" But what have Doctor, sitting in his coach-like Napoleon at rich authors, who loll in carriages, to dread Waterloo-would have cried "Tout est perdu from dogs, who always go on foot? We can--sauve qui peut !"—and re-galloping to a prenot credit the very sweeping assertion, that multitudes of men, women, and children have died in consequence of being bitten by dogs. Even the newspapers do not run up the amount above a dozen per annum, from which you may safely deduct two-thirds. Now, four men, women and children, are not "a multitude." Of those four, we may set down two as problematical-having died, it is true, in, but not of hydrophobia-states of mind and body wide as the poles asunder. He who drinks two bottles of pure spirit every day he buttons and with a fine, pure, clear, bold dash of Platoni unbuttons his breeches, generally dies in a cism. The most brutal Cynic, if now alive state of hydrophobia-for he abhorred water, and snarling, must therefore answer for him and knew instinctively the jug containing that self-while we tell the Doctor, that so far from insipid element. But he never dies at all of holding, with him, that the life of the most hydrophobia, there being evidence to prove humble human being is of more value than all that for twenty years he had drunk nothing but the dogs in the world, we, on the contrary, brandy. Suppose we are driven to confess the verily believe that there is many an humble dog other two-why, one of them was an old wo- whose life far transcends in value the lives of man of eighty, who was dying as fast as she many men, women, and children. Whether or could hobble, at the very time she thought her- not dogs have souls, is a question in philoso self bitten-and the other a nine-year-old brat, phy never yet solved; although we have our in hooping-cough and measles, who, had there selves no doubt on the subject, and firmly be not been such a quadruped as a dog created, lieve that they have souls. But the question, would have worried itself to death before eve- as put by the Doctor, is not about souls, but ning, so lamentably had its education been about lives; and as the human soul does not neglected, and so dangerous an accomplish- die when the human body does, the death of ment is an impish temper. The twelve cases an old woman, middle-aged man, or young for the year of that most horrible disease, hy- child, is no such very great calamity, either to drophobia, have, we flatter ourselves, been themselves or to the world. Better, perhaps, satisfactorily disposed of-eight of the alleged that all the dogs now alive should be massadeceased being at this moment engaged at cred, to prevent hydrophobia, than that a hu various handicrafts, on low wages indeed, but man soul should be lost;-but not a single hustill such as enable the industrious to live- man soul is going to be lost, although the two having died of drinking-one of extreme whole canine species should become insane old age, and one of a complication of com- to-morrow. Now, would the Doctor have laid plaints incident to childhood, their violence one hand on his heart and the other on his having, in this particular instance, been aggra- Bible, and taken solemn oath that rather vated by neglect and a devilish temper. Where than that one old woman of a century and a now the" multitude" of men, women, and chil-quarter should suddenly be cut off by the bite dren, who have died in consequence of being bitten by mad dogs?

of a mad dog, he would have signed the warrant of execution of all the packs of harriers and Gentle reader-a mad dog is a bugbear; we fox-hounds, all the pointers, spaniels, setters, have walked many hundred times the diame- and cockers, all the stag-hounds, greyhounds, ter and the circumference of this our habitable and lurchers, all the Newfoundlanders, shepgiove-along all roads, public and private-herd-dogs, mastiffs, bull-dogs, and terriers, the