for no new dainties; when, to the astonishment of them, and almost of D. himself, the purchase of the preceding day was served up piping hot- the cook declaring, that she did not know well what it was, for "her master always marketed." His guests were not so happy in their ignorance. They kept dogs.

I will do D. the justice to say, that on such occasions he took what happened in the best humour possible. He had no false modesty--though I have generally observed, that persons, who are quite deficient in that mauvaise honte, are seldom over-troubled with the quality itself, of which it is the counterfeit.

It is

By what arts, with his pretensions, D. contrived to wriggle himself into a seat in the Academy, I am not acquainted enough with the intrigues of that body (more involved than those of an Italian conclave) to pronounce. certain, that neither for love to him, nor out of any respect to his talents, did they elect him. Individually he was obnoxious to them all. I have heard that, in his passion for attaining this object, he went so far as to go down upon his knees to some of the members, whom he thought least favourable, and beg their suffrage with many tears.

But death, which extends the measure of a man's stature to appearance; and wealth, which men worship in life and death, which makes giants of punies, and embalms insignificance; called around the exequies of this pigmy Painter the rank, the riches, the fashion of the world. By Academic hands his pall was borne; by the carriages of nobles of the land, and of ambassadors from foreign powers, his bier was followed; and St. Pauls (O worthy casket for the shrine of such a Zeuxis) now holds-ALL THAT WAS MORTAL OF G. D.

Table-Talk, by the Late Elia.

(The Athenæum, 4 January, 1834.)

THE greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.

'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.

Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it,--how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all. These I call furniture wives; as men buy furniture pictures, because they suit this or that niche in their dining parlours.

Your universally cried-up beauties are the very last choice which a man of taste would make. What pleases all, cannot have that individual charm which makes this or that countenance engaging to you, and to you only perhaps, you know not why. What gained the fair Gunnings titled husbands, who, after all, turned out very sorry wives? Popular repute.

It is a sore trial when a daughter shall marry against her father's approbation. A little hardheartedness, and aversion to a reconcilement, is almost pardonable. After all, Will Dockwray's way is, perhaps, the wisest. His best-loved daughter made a most imprudent match; in fact, eloped with the last man in the world that her father would have wished her to marry. All the world said that he would never speak to her again. For months she durst not write to him, much less come near him. But, in a casual rencounter, he met her in the streets of Ware,-Ware, that will long remember the mild virtues of William Dockwray, Esq. What said the parent to his disobedient child, whose knees faltered under her at the sight of him? Ha, Sukey! is it you?" with that benevolent aspect with which he paced the streets of Ware, venerated as an angel "come and dine with us on Sunday; then turning away, and again turning back, as if he had forgotten something, he added, "and, Sukey, do you hear, bring your husband with you." This was all the reproof she ever heard from him. Need it be added, that the match turned out better for Susan than the world expected?

་་

"We read the "Paradise Lost" as a task," says Dr. Johnson. Nay, rather as a celestial recreation, of which the dullard mind is not at all hours alike recipient. Nobody ever wished it longer," nor the moon rounder, he might have added. Why, 'tis the perfectness and completeness of it which makes us imagine that not a line could be added to it, or diminished from it with advantage. Would we have a cubit added to the stature of the Medicean Venus? Do we wish her taller?

Edgar Look up, my lord.

Kent. Vex not his ghost. O let him pass. He hates him,
That would upon the rack of this rough world

Stretch him out longer."

So ends King Lear, the most stupendous of the Shaksperian dramas; and Kent, the noblest feature of the conceptions of his divine mind. This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer, having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence. What a pudder would a common dramatist have raised here of a reconciliation scene, a perfect recognition, between the assumed Caius and his master!-to the suffusing of many fair eyes, and the moistening of cambric handkerchiefs. The old dying king partially catching at the truth, and immediately lapsing into obliviousness, with the high-minded carelessness of the other to have his services appreciated,-as one that-

"Se not for gain, Or follow d out of form,"

are among the most judicious, not to say heart-touching strokes in Shakspere.

Allied to this magnanimity it is, where the pitch and point of an argument, the amplification of which might compromise the modesty of the speaker, is delivered briefly, and as it were, parenthetically; as in those few but pregnant words, in which the man in the old "Nut-brown Maid" rather intimates than reveals his unsuspected high birth to the woman :

Turn we to the aversion of it, ten times diluted, of dear Mat Prior,-in his own way unequalled, and a poet now-a-days too much neglected. "In me," quoth Henry, addressing the astounded Emma,-with a flourish and an attitude, as we may conceive,

"In me behold the potent Edgar's heir,
Illustrious Earl! him terrible in war,
Let Loire confess.'

And with a deal of skimble-skamble stuff, as Hotspur would term it, more, presents the lady with a full and true enumeration of his papa's rent-roll in the fat soil by Deva.

But, of all parentheses (not to quit the topic too suddenly), commend me to that most significant one, at the commencement of the old popular ballad of "Fair Rosamund :

Now mark,

"When good King Henry ruled this land,

The second of that name,"

"(Besides the Queen) he dearly loved
A fair and comely dame."

There is great virtue in this besides.

Amidst the complaints of the wide spread of infidelity among us, it is consolatory that a sect is sprung up in the heart of the metropolis, and is daily on the increase, of teachers of that healing doctrine which Pope upheld, and against which Voltaire directed his envenomed wit: we mean those practical preachers of optimism, or the belief that whatever is is best; the cads of omnibuses, who from their little back pulpits, not once in three or four hours, as those proclaimers of "God and his prophet" in Mussulman countries, but every minute, at the entry or exist of a brief passenger, are heard, in an almost prophetic tone, to exclaim (Wisdom crying out, as it were, in the streets), ALL'S RIGHT!"

(The Athenæum, 7th June, 1834.)

Advice is not so commonly thrown away as is imagined. We seek it in difficulties. But in common speech we are apt to confound with it admonition; as when a friend reminds one that drink is prejudicial to the health, &c. We do not care to be told of that which we know better than the good man that admonishes. M- sent to his friend L-, who is no water drinker, a twopenny tract "Against the Use of Fermented Liquors." L-acknowledged the obligation, as far as to twopence. Penotier's advice was the safest, after all:

"I advised him-"

But I must tell you. The dear, good-meaning, no-thinking creature had been dumb-founding a company of us with a detail of inextricable difficulties, in which the circumstances of an acquaintance of his were involved. No clue of light offered itself. He grew more and more misty as he proceeded. We pitied his friend, and thought,

when, suddenly brightening up his placid countenance like one that had found out a riddle, and looked to have the solution admired,

At last," said he, "I advised him

Here he paused, and here we were again interminably thrown back. By no possible guess could any of us aim at the drift of the meaning he was about to be delivered of.

"I advised him," he repeated, "to have some advice upon the subject."

A general approbation followed; and it was unanimously agreed, that, under all the circumstances of the case, no sounder or more judicious counsel could have been given

A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

Parson W- is not quite so continent as Diana, yet prettily dissembleth his frailty. Is Parson W- -, therefore, a hypocrite? I think not. Where the concealment of a vice is less pernicious than the bare-faced publication of it would be, no additional delinquency is incurred in the secrecy. Parson W-is simply an immoral clergyman. But if Parson W were to be for ever haranguing on the opposite virtue; choosing for his perpetual text, in preference to all other pulpit-topics, the remarkable resistance recorded in the 39th of Exodus; dwelling, moreover, and dilating upon it, then Parson W might be reasonably suspected of hypocrisy. But Parson W- rarely diverteth into such line of argument, or toucheth it briefly. His ordinary topics are fetched from "obedience to the powers that are," "submission to the civil magistrate in all commands that are not absolutely unlawful;" on which he can delight to expatiate with equal fervour and sincerity.

Again to despise a person is properly to look down upon him with none or the least possible emotion. But when Clementina, who has lately lost her lover, with bosom heaving, eyes flashing, and her whole frame in agitation, pronounces with a peculiar emphasis that she "despises the fellow," depend upon it that he is not quite so despicable in her eyes as she would have us imagine.

One more instance: If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a truism; as to say, "A good name is a proof of a man's estimation in the world." We seem to be saying something when we say nothing. I was describing to F some knavish tricks of a mutual friend of ours. "If he did so and so," was the reply, "he cannot be an honest man.' Here was a genuine truism, truth upon truth, inference and proposition identical; or rather a dictionary definition usurping the place of an inference.

"

(The Athenæum, 19th July, 1834.)

The vices of some men are magnificent. Compare the amours of Henry the Eighth and Charles the Second. The Stuart had mistresses: the Tudor kept wives.

We are ashamed at sight of a monkey,-somehow as we are shy of poor relations.

Cimagined a Caledonian compartment in Hades, where there should be fire without sulphur.

Absurd images are sometimes irresistible. I will mention two,—an elephant in a coach-office gravely coming to have his trunk booked; a mermaid over a fish-kettle cooking her own tail.

It is the praise of Shakspere, with reference to the play-writers, his contemporaries, that he has so few revolting characters. Yet he has one that is singularly mean and disagreeable, the king in Hamlet. Neither has he characters of insignificance, unless the phantom that stalks over the stage, as Julius Caesar, in the play of that name, may be accounted one. Neither has he envious characters, excepting the short part of Don John, in Much Ado about Nothing. Neither has he unentertaining characters, if we except Parolles, and the little that there is of the Clown, in All's Well that Ends Well.

It would settle the dispute as to whether Shakspere intended Othello for a jealous character, to consider how differently we are affected towards him, and Leontes in the Winter's Tale. Leontes is that character. Othello's fault was simply credulity.

Is it possible that Shakspere should never have read Homer, in Chapman's version at least? If he had read it, could he mean to travesty it in the parts of those big boobies, Ajax and Achilles? Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon are true to their parts in the Iliad: they are gentlemen at least. Thersites, though unamusing, is fairly deducible from it. Troilus and Cressida are a fine graft upon it. But those two big bulks

It is a desideratum in works that treat de re culinaria, that we have no rationale of sauces or theory of mixed flavours: as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why loin of veal (a pretty problem), being itself unctuous, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of melted butter,--and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhorreth from it; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnip, brawn makes a dead-set at mustard; why cats prefer valerian to heart's-ease, old ladies vice versâ, - though this is rather traveling out of the road of the dietetics, and may be thought a question more curious than relevant; why salmon (a strong sapor per se) fortifieth its condition with the mighty lobster sauce, whose embraces are fatal to the delicater relish of the turbot; why oysters in death rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam by turns court and are accepted by the compliable mutton hash, she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us; so that, if Nature should furnish us with a new meat, or be prodigally pleased to restore the phoenix, upon a given flavour, we might be able to pronounce instantly, on philosophical principles, what the sauce to it should be,-what the curious adjuncts.

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