course of editorship on 1st of January, 1731, O.S.; and, from this, we may give a good guess at his state of senility. He was, there is no doubt of it, constitutionally staid and saturnine, and therefore better adapted to much of the mechanical, and eke the discretionary business of an Editor at 25, than you are, Christopher, (be it said without offence,) even at this present writing; seeing as how he never got into a scrape, or roused any heart burnings, in near a century's supervision; while you, at your sober time of life, when you ought to be more prudent, can hardly repress the flashes and fiery out-breaks of your volcanic genius. Let him, then, have begun at 25, this brings him out to be at least 115 years old. Now, really, to make a convert of such an antediluvian, and to inspirit him with such near approaches to rejuvenescence, merely by the force of your bouncing animal spirits, is indeed somewhat to boast of.

But poetry, sweet poetry, is your forte. I have little to mention about that which you have written yourself, although it be greatly more than the world wots of. Let the Reading Public, when they are struck with wonder at the beauty of any anonymous bijou, or when they have puzzled their brains, and teazed one another, all to no purpose, in inquiring after the bodily owner of some likely, but imaginary name, affixed to a successful tale in verse, romance, idyll, ballad, or drama-which seeming author is not to be found under that deceptive appellation, from the Lizard Point, to John o' Groat's-Let them, I say, in defect of claimant for the laurel wreath, which the brows of the inditer thereof are entitled to, pay the tribute of their admiration to Christopher North -they will not often be in the wrong. Who wrote the Pursuits of Literature? A fig for Mr Mathias-he has never owned it, from A. D. 1792, down to this present 1821, being the first year after bissextile. Who wrote the Loves of the Triangles? Some whippersnapper replies, "Undoubtedly Canning, or Frere, or it was a joint concern of that witty set ;" and if the hearer is contented-be it so-but, I say, it is a secret still. Who wrote the Rejected Addresses? Who wrote Whistlecraft? It was very cunning in the booksellers to put Sir Walter Scott's name to the Bridal of Triermain, after

that exposed and parentless bantling had been nursed up by public applause, to a good measure of health and chubbiness, because it set the sale a-going again-but did Sir Walter write it? I doubt it; for he, honest man, is busy enough at Abbotsford, and little likely to trouble his brains with book-vending manoeuvres; and I question if it has ever reached his ears, that this pretty imitation of him is now actually exposed to sale as goods of his genuine manufacture. It is confessed, that the Nithsdale and Galloway Songs are not all old; there are many modern ballads, surpassing the ancient perhaps, in that admirable Garland-Now, who wrote them? Does somebody say Allan Cunningham? Pooh, he has enough to do chipping marble at Chantrey's, without making rhymes to the clink of his hammer. Who wrote the Poetic Mirror? Who wrote Ellen Fitzarthur? Who wrote Henry Schultze, and others, divers and sundry, of various sorts and sizes? I do not pretend, Christopher, that you are positively the progenitor of all and every of these, but I confess my suspicions, that you are the writer of most of them, for I know it is not your way to be jealous of your own fame, provided that what you launch into the world has answered its end, in amusing or instructing your contemporaries, either by setting afloat the sacred fount of sympathetic tears, or by suppling those muscles about the jaws, which experience dilatation during mirth. I say then, that, provided whichever of these ends you may have intended, be answered, you let the gossips father the brat on whomsoever they please; and ascribe it to somebody or other they certainly will. Well, well, however sublime, picturesque, harmonious, spirited, humorous, or witty a poet you may be yourself, the gist of my present panegyric does not lie in that it is, that you are the fosterer of the art in others. Like Falstaff, you are not only witty yourself, but the cause of wit in others; and, what he was not, you are poetical also, and the cause of poetry in others. Which genius of the present day is not indebted to you for encouragement, when he has done well-for direction, when he is sliding unawares into a wrong course-and for reproof, when he has quite deviated from good taste? Even your sharpnesses have been

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wholesome correctives-and his Majesty, at Lisson Grove, (which is the Versailles, the suburban retreat of the Grand Monarque of Cockaigne,) has in consequence committed of late few or no versicular trespasses against sense, language, and metre. To be sure, Corny Webb has given us a gross of green sonnets," in the New Literary Pocket-Book; but except that they are all along alarmingly alliterative, and hobble a little at times, as if they had corns, there is much pretty imagery in them; and, I hope, they will not be so useless to the publisher, as the "green spectacles," were to the Vicar of Wakefield, which Moses brought home from the fair. But, Christopher, this is not all that you have done you are, like Jaques, "so full of matter," that the stray riches, which you pour out in your rambling way, set I know not how many artificers a working. Phoebus Apollo only knows the number of harps that lay unstrummed for want of subjects, till their possessors laid hold of some scattered thought of yours; and then made mayhap, a very passable set of verses, on the strength of it alone. You are like the wind, which bears about upon its pinions, abundance of plumed seeds, and recklessly lets them drop here and there, not at all mindful what may spring from the chance-given boon; whether it be a gorgeous amarynth, a nemo me impune lacesset thistle, or only a little diuretic dandelion-so is it with you, your winged words are tossed up, and go wherever Maga soars, and you little guess how germi nant they are in many a soil, on which they alight. I freely confess to you, that I am one of those who take my catch-word from your pregnant compositions. Somewhere or other, you said, that you dreamed of having drunk up all the water in the reservoir on the Castle-Hill, (though, whether there be a reservoir or not in that place, I cannot tell.) Well, the hint so set my brain fermenting, and raised such "yeasty waves" in the medullary matter under my bumps, of constructiveness and ideality, that I had no peace till the following poem was brewed, fixed down, barrelled, and shipped for the land where Ebony groweth-a tree of no unpropitious shelter! There is one drawback, however, to my satisfaction, for it turns out to have an unfortunate resemblance to the "Darkness" of his

Ex-Lordship of Newstead, so that I am fearful that the originality of mine may be called in question. That said "Darkness" of the noble Baron, although it wears the physiognomy of a poem, may, if its physiology be narrowly pried into, be ascertained to have much more of the properties of a scientific paper. The problem he takes in hand may be thus enunciated :-" Given the practicability of popping an extinguisher over the sun, and of co-instantaneously stopping the increase of supplies which are known to augment in arithmetical ratio-find the length of candle light, and bonfire light, which will be afforded by the present stock of muttons on hand(vide Surveys of the Board of Agriculture,) by the store already imported of timber, pitch, rosin, &c. (vide Monthly Commercial Reports, Blackwood's Magazine,) and by all other homeraised combustible and luciferous matter." And really it is very well worked, as far as it goes, and as it is in a branch of physics hitherto not much rummaged into, it was not to be presumed that any thing farther than an approximation to a solution would be hit upon at first. It much astonieth

me, that the Cambridge Philosophical Society have not had it read at any one of their sittings, considering that his Lordship is a member of the Ultra-Mathematical University, in what that society is a tender Neophyte, and possibly in want of so subtle a calculator as my Lord has shewn himself to be, in this first essor of his talents into the regions of physical science.

Now, to conclude with a deprecation, for my say is almost said. "You, Christopher, lighted the taper of my inspiration; beware then, that you do not quench it with that pair of snuffers of evil augury, which you use in snuffing off the wick of many a hapless contributor's rush-light. For, even though (in that unpleasant business of rejection) you wield the implement with infinite grace, and a sort of chirurgical avoidance of giving needless pain, yet all won't do; rejeté is not consoled in his state of obfuscation, even by such flourishes of the hand as these. "We return your Hints towards ascertaining the System of Ethics likely to be predominant in Botany Bay, towards the close of this Centu ry, and although we cannot deny the talent it evinces, yet allow us to say

DOCTOR KITCHENER, we are quite ready to take for granted, is a very hale and praise-worthy person indeed, possessing an excellent appetite and liberal mind, blending considerable knowledge with strong powers of digestion, and uniting the stomach of a horse to the nobler attributes of man. With all this, however, we do not hesitate to pronounce him the most unfit person in the world to write a cookery-book. Many of these qualities are certainly perfectly inconsistent with that delicate and refined discrimination of the palatal organs which forms the very basis of the philosophy of the stew pan. They may indeed enable the worthy Doctor to appreciate with perfect accuracy the merits or defects of any given dish of beef and cabbage to shine as a connoisseur on Yorkshirepudding-a dilettante on bubble-andsqueak-or to descant with much precision on the scientific preparation of roly-poly dumplings, or the mystical union of goose and apple-sauce. But to all the nobler and more lofty aspirations of the art—to all its finer and more shadowy perfections-to that exquisite and transcendental " gout" which marks the most complicated dishes of a master, we take leave to consider him an utter stranger.

It is perhaps to be lamented that a person whose constitution affords such evidence of abdominal and mental power, displaying so rare and enviable an amalgamation of the spirit and the flesh, should have been led unprofitably to devote himself to the only pursuit in which these distinctions must contribute to impede his success. If ever there was a person marked out by nature not to cook, but to devour-not to study and explain the works of creation, but "inwardly to digest them;" one who is " Fruges consumere natus," and destined

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-in viscera viscera condi

the author of the "Cook's Oracle" is the man. Why then has the Doctor thus wantonly deviated from the orbit in which he was wisely destined to revolve?-why has he forsaken the safe and beaten track of physic, to wander amid the wilds and mazes of cookery?—why must he exchange the spatula for the carving-knife-the pill, the bolus, the electuary, for the rump, the cutlet, the ragout? Are there no boundaries to the erratic flights of genius in these days of universal acquirement, and are we destined yet to see the astronomer descending to the kitchen from his "watch-tower in the sky," squinting with one eye at the planets, and with the other at the spit, and simultaneously watching, with equal ardour, the transit of Venus, and the simmering of the turkey?

Whether such professional aberrations are ever to become commonwhether we are destined to encounter Dr Baillie in a white apron, in the act of skewering a wild-duck, or Sir Henry Halford brandishing a soup-ladle in the kitchen, we shall not venture to predict; but regarding such encroachments with considerable jealousy, we shall certainly discountenance them as much as in us lies, till we find them sanctioned by higher names and weightier authority than those of Dr Kitchener.

It is an axiom, founded on experience, that strength in the digestive organs is never found united to delicacy of perception in the palatal ones; or, in other words, that nicety of taste is found to be uniformly connected with delicacy of stomach. The degree of vigilance exercised by the palate in the admission of intruders is constantly regulated by the tone and temper of the stomach. Where the latter is robust and vigorous in the performance of its various functions, the caution of the former is always proportionably