Could he be more sedentary, during the psalm, in his own pulpit?

We must object, too, to the illustration of wine and water. Let no man who has been so unfortunate as to be accustomed to drink water, be afraid all at once to begin to drink wine. Let him, without fear or trembling, boldly fill bumpers to the Throne--the Navy--and the Army.

These three bumpers will have made him a new man. We have no objection whatever to his drinking, in animated succession, the Apotheosis of the Whigs--the Angler's delight--the cause of Liberty all over the World--Christopher North--Maga the Immortal.--"Nature will not suffer any sudden transition!" Will she not? Look at our water-drinker now! His very own mother could not know him--he has lost all resemblance to his twin-brother, from whom, two short hours ago, you could not have distinguished him but for a slight scar on his brow--so completely is his apparent personal identity lost, that it would be impossible for him to establish an _alibi_. He sees a figure in the mirror above the chimney-piece, but has not the slightest suspicion that the rosy-faced Bacchanal is himself, the water-drinker; but then he takes care to imitate the manual exercise of the phantom--lifting his glass to his lips at the very same moment, as if they were both moved by one soul.

The Doctor then wisely remarks, that it is "impossible to lay down any rule by which to regulate the number of miles a man may journey in a day, or to prescribe the precise number of ounces he ought to eat; but that nature has given us a very excellent guide in a sense of lassitude, which is as unerring in exercise as the sense of satiety is in eating."

We say the Doctor wisely remarks, yet not altogether wisely; for the rule does not seem to hold always good either in exercise or in eating.

What more common than to feel oneself very much fatigued--quite done up as it were, and unwilling to stir hand or foot. Up goes a lark in heaven--tira-lira--or suddenly the breezes blow among the clouds, who forthwith all begin campaigning in the sky, or, quick as lightning, the sunshine in a moment resuscitates a drowned day--or tripping along, all by her happy self, to the sweet accompaniment of her joy-varied songs, the woodman's daughter passes by on her way, with a basket in her hand, to her father in the forest, who has already laid down his axe on the meridian shadow darkening one side of the straight stem of an oak, beneath whose grove might be drawn up five-score of plumed chivalry!

Where is your "sense of lassitude now, nature's unerring guide in exercise?" You spring up from the mossy wayside bank, and renewed both in mind and body, "rejoicing in Nature's joy," you continue to pass over houseless moors, by small, single, solitary, straw-roofed huts, through villages gathered round Stone Cross, Elm Grove, or old Monastic Tower, till, unwearied in lith and limb, you see sunset beautifying all the west, and drop in, perhaps, among the hush of the Cottar's Saturday Night--for it is in sweet Scotland we are walking in our dream--and know not, till we have stretched ourselves on a bed of rushes or of heather, that "kind Nature's sweet restorer balmy sleep," is yet among the number of our bosom friends--alas! daily diminishing beneath fate or fortune, the sweeping scythe-stroke of death, or the whisper of some one poor, puny, idle, and unmeaning word!

Then, as to "the sense of satiety in eating." It is produced in us by three platefuls of hotch-potch--and, to the eyes of an ordinary observer, our dinner would seem to be at an end. But no--strictly speaking, it is just going to begin. About an hour ago did we, standing on the very beautiful bridge of Perth, see that identical salmon, with his back-fin just visible above the translucent tide, arrowing up the Tay, bold as a bridegroom, and nothing doubting that he should spend his honeymoon among the gravel-beds of Kinnaird or Moulinearn, or the rocky sofas of the Tummel, or the green marble couches of the Tilt. What has become now of "the sense of satiety in eating?" John--the castors!--mustard--vinegar--cayenne--catchup--pease and potatoes, with a very little butter--the biscuit called "rusk"--and the memory of the hotch-potch is as that of Babylon the Great. That any gigot of mutton, exquisite though much of the five-year-old blackfaced must assuredly be, can, with any rational hopes of success, contend against a haunch of venison, will be asserted by no devout lover of truth. Try the two by alternate platefuls, and you will uniformly find that you leave off after the venison. That "sense of satiety in eating," of which Dr Kitchiner speaks, was produced by the Tay salmon devoured above--but of all the transitory feelings of us transitory creatures on our transit through this transitory world, in which the Doctor asserts nature will not suffer any sudden transitions, the most transitory ever experienced by us is "the sense of satiety in eating." Therefore, we have now seen it for a moment existing on the disappearance of the hotch-potch--dying on the appearance of the Tay salmon--once more noticeable as the last plate of the noble fish melted away--extinguished suddenly by the vision of the venison--again felt for an instant, and but for an instant--for a brace and a half of as fine grouse as ever expanded their voluptuous bosoms to be devoured by hungry love! Sense of satiety in eating indeed!

If you please, my dear friend, one of the backs--pungent with the most palate-piercing, stomach-stirring, heart-warming, soul-exalting of all tastes--the wild bitter-sweet.

But the Doctor returns to the subject of travelling--and fatigue. "When one begins," he says, "to be low-spirited and dejected, to yawn often and be drowsy, when the appetite is impaired, when the smallest movement occasions a fluttering of the pulse, when the mouth becomes dry, and is sensible of a bitter taste, _seek refreshment and repose_, if you wish to PREVENT ILLNESS, already beginning to take place." Why, our dear Doctor, illness in such a deplorable case as this, is just about to end, and death is beginning to take place. Thank Heaven, it is a condition to which we do not remember having very nearly approximated! Who ever saw us yawn? or drowsy? or with our appetite impaired, except on the withdrawal of the table-cloth? or low-spirited, but when the Glenlivet was at ebb? Who dare declare that he ever saw our mouth dry? or sensible of a bitter taste, since we gave over munching rowans? Put your ringer on our wrist, at any moment you choose, from June to January, from January to June, and by its pulsation you may rectify Harrison's or Kendal's chronometer.

But the Doctor proceeds--"By raising the temperature of my room to about 65, a broth diet, and taking a tea-spoonful of Epsom salts in half a pint of warm water, and repeating it every half-hour till it moves the bowels twice or thrice, and retiring to rest an hour or two sooner than usual, I have often very speedily got rid of colds, &c."

Why, there may be no great harm in acting as above; although we should far rather recommend a screed of the Epsoms. A tea-spoonful of Epsom salts in half a pint of warm water, reminds one, somehow or other, of Tims. A small matter works a Cockney. It is not so easy--and that the Cockneys well know--to move the bowels of old Christopher North. We do not believe that a tea-spoonful of anything in this world would have any serious effect on old "Ironsides." We should have no hesitation in backing him against so much corrosive sublimate. He would dine out on the day he had bolted that quantity of arsenic;--and would, we verily believe, rise triumphant from a tea-spoonful of Prussic acid.

We could mention a thousand cures for "colds, et cetera," more efficacious than a broth diet, a warm room, a tea-spoonful of Epsom salts, or early roosting. What say you, our dear Dean, to half-a-dozen tumblers of hot toddy? Your share of a brown jug to the same amount? Or an equal quantity, in its gradual decrease revealing deeper and deeper still the romantic Welsh scenery of the Devil's Punch-Bowl? _Adde tot_ small-bearded oysters, all redolent of the salt-sea foam, and worthy, as they stud the Ambrosial brodd, to be licked off all at once by the lambent tongue of Neptune. That antiquated calumny against the character of toasted cheese--that, forsooth, it is indigestible--has been trampled under the march of mind; and therefore, you may tuck in a pound of double Gloucester. Other patients, labouring under catarrh, may, very possibly, prefer the roasted how-towdy--or the green goose from his first stubble-field--or why not, by way of a little variety, a roasted maukin, midway between hare and leveret, tempting as maiden between woman and girl, or, as the Eastern poet says, between a frock and a gown? Go to bed--no need of warming-pans--about a quarter before one;--you will not hear that small hour strike--you will sleep sound till sunrise, sound as the Black Stone at Scone, on which the Kings of Scotland were crowned of old. And if you contrive to carry a cold about you next day, you deserve to be sent to Coventry by all sensible people--and may, if you choose, begin taking, with Tims, a tea-spoonful of Epsom salts in a half-pint of warm water every half-hour, till it moves your bowels twice or thrice; but if you do, be your sex, politics, or religion what they may, never shall ye be suffered to contribute even a bit of Balaam to the Magazine.

The Doctor then treats of the best Season for travelling, and very judiciously observes that it is during these months when there is no occasion for a fire--that is, just before and after the extreme heat. In winter, Dr Kitchiner, who was a man of extraordinary powers of observation, observed, "that the ways are generally bad, and often dangerous, especially in hilly countries, by reason of the snow and ice.

The days are short--a traveller comes late to his lodging, and is often forced to rise before the sun in the morning--besides, the country looks dismal--nature is, as it were, half dead. The summer corrects all these inconveniences." Paradoxical as this doctrine may at first sight appear--yet we have verified it by experience--having for many years found, without meeting with one single exception, that the fine, long, warm days of summer are an agreeable and infallible corrective of the inconveniences attending the foul, short, cold days of winter--a season which is surly without being sincere, blustering rather than bold--an intolerable bore--always pretending to be taking his leave, yet domiciliating himself in another man's house for weeks together--and, to be plain, a season so regardless of truth, that nobody believes him till frost has hung an ice-padlock on his mouth, and his many-river'd voice is dumb under the wreathed snows.

"Cleanliness when travelling," observes the Doctor, "is doubly necessary; to sponge the body every morning with tepid water, and then rub it dry with a rough towel, will greatly contribute to preserve health. To put the feet into warm water for a couple of minutes just before going to bed, is very refreshing, and inviting to sleep; for promoting tranquillity, both mental and corporeal, a clean skin may be regarded as next in efficacy to a clear conscience."

Far be it from us to seek to impugn such doctrine. A dirty dog is a nuisance not to be borne. But here the question arises--who--what--is a dirty dog? Now there are men (no women) naturally--necessarily--dirty.

They are not dirty by chance--or accident--say twice or thrice per diem; but they are always dirty--at all times and in all places--and never and nowhere more disgustingly so than when figged out for going to church.

It is in the skin, in the blood--in the flesh, and in the bone--that with such the disease of dirt more especially lies. We beg pardon--no less in the hair. Now, such persons do not know that they are dirty--that they are unclean beasts. On the contrary, they often think themselves pinks of purity--incarnations of carnations--impersonations of moss-roses--the spiritual essences of lilies, "imparadised in form of that sweet flesh." Now, were such persons to change their linen every half-hour, night and day, that is, were they to put on forty-eight clean shirts in the twenty-four hours--and it might not be reasonable, perhaps, to demand more of them under a government somewhat too Whiggish--yet though we cheerfully grant that one and all of the shirts would be dirty, we as sulkily deny that at any given moment from sunrise to sunset, and over again, the wearer would be clean. He would be just every whit and bit as dirty as if he had known but one single shirt all his life--and firmly believed his to be the only shirt in the universe.

Men again, on the other hand, there are--and, thank God, in great numbers--who are naturally so clean, that we defy you to make them _bona fide_ dirty. You may as well drive down a duck into a dirty puddle, and expect lasting stains on its pretty plumage. Pope says the same thing of swans--that is, Poets--when speaking of Aaron Hill diving into the ditch,--

"He bears no tokens of the sabler streams, But soars far off among the swans of Thames."

Pleasant people of this kind of constitution you see going about of a morning rather in dishabille--hair uncombed haply--face and hands even unwashed--and shirt with a somewhat day-before-yesterdayish hue. Yet are they, so far from being dirty, at once felt, seen, and smelt, to be among the very cleanest of her Majesty's subjects. The moment you shake hands with them, you feel in the firm flesh of palm and finger that their heart's-blood circulates purely and freely from the point of the highest hair on the apex of the pericranium, to the edge of the nail on the large toe of the right foot. Their eyes are as clear as unclouded skies--the apples on their cheeks are like those on the tree--what need, in either case, of rubbing off dust or dew with a towel? What though, from sleeping without a nightcap, their hair may be a little toozy? It is not dim--dull--oily--like half-withered sea-weeds! It will soon comb itself with the fingers of the west wind--that tent-like tree its toilette--its mirror that pool of the clear-flowing Tweed.

Some streams, just like some men, are always dirty--you cannot possibly tell why--unproducible to good pic-nic society either in dry or wet weather. In dry, the oozy wretches are weeping among the slippery weeds, infested with eels and powheads. In wet, they are like so many common-sewers, strewn with dead cats and broken crockery, and threatening with their fierce fulzie to pollute the sea. The sweet, soft, pure rains, soon as they touch the flood are changed into filth.

The sun sees his face in one of the pools, and is terrified out of his senses. He shines no more that day. The clouds have no notion of being caricatured, and the trees keep cautiously away from the brink of such streams--save, perchance, now and then, here and there, a weak well-meaning willow--a thing of shreds and patches--its leafless wands covered with bits of old worsted stockings, crowns of hats, a bauchle (see Dr Jamieson), and the remains of a pair of corduroy breeches, long hereditary in the family of the Blood-Royal of the Yetholm Gypsies.

Some streams, just like some men, are always clean--you cannot well tell why--producible to good pic-nic society either in dry or wet weather. In dry, the pearly waters are singing among the freshened flowers--so that the trout, if he chooses, may breakfast upon bees. In wet, they grow, it is true, dark and drumly--and at midnight, when heaven's candles are put out, loud and oft the angry spirit of the water shrieks. But Aurora beholds her face in the clarified pools and shallows--far and wide glittering with silver or with gold. All the banks and braes reappear green as emerald from the subsiding current--into which look with the eye of an angler, and you behold a Fish--a twenty-pounder--steadying himself--like an uncertain shadow; and oh! for George Scougal's leister to strike him through the spine! Yes, these are the images of trees far down, as if in another world; and, whether you look up or look down, alike in all its blue, braided, and unbounded beauty, is the morning sky!

Irishmen are generally men of the kind thus illustrated--generally sweet--at least in their own green Isle; and that was the best argument in favour of Catholic Emancipation.--So are Scotsmen. Whereas, blindfolded, take a London, Edinburgh, or Glasgow Cockney's hand, immediately after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your nose--and you will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has substituted in lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid fives, the body of some chicken-butcher of a weasel, that died of the plague. We have seen as much of what is most ignorantly and malignantly denominated dirt--one week's earth--washed off the feet of a pretty young girl on a Saturday night, at a single sitting in the little rivulet that runs almost round about her father's hut, as would have served him to raise his mignonette in, or his crop of cresses. How beautifully glowed the crimson-snow of the singing creature's new-washed feet! First, as they shone almost motionless beneath the lucid waters--and then, fearless of the hard bent and rough roots of the heather, bore the almost alarming Fairy dancing away from the eyes of the stranger; till the courteous spirit that reigns over all the Highland wilds arrested her steps knee-deep in bloom, and bade her bow her auburn head, as, blushing, she faltered forth, in her sweet Gaelic accents, a welcome that thrilled like a blessing through the heart of the Sassenach, nearly benighted, and wearied sore with the fifty glorious mountain-miles that intermit at times their frowning forests from the corries of Cruachan to the cliffs of Cairngorm.

It will be seen from these hurried remarks, that there is more truth than perhaps Dr Kitchiner was aware of in his apothegm--"that a clean skin may be regarded as next in efficacy to a clear conscience." But the Doctor had but a very imperfect notion of the meaning of the words "clean skin"--his observation being not even skin-deep. A wash-hand basin, a bit of soap, and a coarse towel, he thought would give a Cockney on Ludgate-hill a clean skin--just as many good people think that a Bible, a prayer-book, and a long sermon, can give a clear conscience to a criminal in Newgate. The cause of the evil, in both cases, lies too deep for tears. Millions of men and women pass through nature to eternity clean-skinned and pious--with slight expense either in soap or sermons; while millions more, with much week-day bodily scrubbing, and much Sabbath spiritual sanctification, are held in bad odour here, while they live, by those who happen to sit near them, and finally go out like the stink of a candle.

Never stir, quoth the Doctor, "without paper, pen, and ink, and a note-book in your pocket. Notes made by pencils are easily obliterated by the motion of travelling. Commit to paper whatever you see, hear, or read, that is remarkable, with your sensations on observing it--do this upon the spot, if possible, at the moment it first strikes you--at all events do not delay it beyond the first convenient opportunity."

Suppose all people behaved in this way--and what an absurd world we should have of it--every man, woman, and child who could write, jotting away at their note-books! This committing to paper of whatever you see, hear, or read, has, among many other bad effects, this one especially--in a few years it reduces you to a state of idiocy. The memory of all men who commit to paper becomes regularly extinct, we have observed, about the age of thirty. Now, although the Memory does not bear a very brilliant reputation among the faculties, a man finds himself very much at a stand who is unprovided with one; for the Imagination, the Judgment, and the Reason walk off in search of the Memory--each in opposite directions; and the Mind, left at home by itself, is in a very awkward predicament--gets comatose--snores loudly, and expires. For our own part, we would much rather lose our Imagination and our Judgment--nay, our very Reason itself--than our Memory--provided we were suffered to retain a little Feeling and a little Fancy.

Committers to paper forget that the Memory is a tablet, or they carelessly fling that mysterious tablet away, soft as wax to receive impressions, and harder than adamant to retain, and put their trust in a bit of calf-skin, or a bundle of old rags.

The observer who instantly jots down every object he sees, never, properly speaking, saw an object in his life. There has always been in the creature's mind a feeling alien to that which the object would, of its pure self, have excited. The very preservation of a sort of style in the creature's remarks, costs him an effort which disables him from understanding what is before him, by dividing the small attention of which he might have been capable, between the jotting, the jotter, and the thing jotted. Then your committer to paper of whatever he sees, hears, or reads, forgets or has never known that all real knowledge, either of men or things, must be gathered up by operations which are in their very being spontaneous and free--the mind being even unconscious of them as they are going on--while the edifice has all the time been silently rising up under the unintermitting labours of those silent workers--Thoughts; and is finally seen, not without wonder, by the Mind or Soul itself, which, gentle reader, was all along Architect and Foreman--had not only originally planned, but had even daily superintended the building of the Temple.

Were Dr Kitchiner not dead, we should just put to him this simple question--Could you, Doctor, not recollect all the dishes of the most various dinner at which you ever assisted, down to the obscurest kidney, without committing every item to your note-book? Yes, Doctor, you could.

Well, then, all the universe is but one great dinner. Heaven and earth, what a show of dishes! From a sun to a salad--a moon to a mutton chop--a comet to a curry--a planet to a pate! What gross ingratitude to the Giver of the feast, not to be able, with the memory he has given us, to remember his bounties! It is true, what the Doctor says, that notes made with pencils are easily obliterated by the motion of travelling; but then, Doctor, notes made by the Mind herself, with the Ruby Pen Nature gives all her children who have also discourse of Reason, are with the slightest touch, easilier far than glass by the diamond, traced on the tablets that disease alone seems to deface, death alone to break, but which, ineffaceable, and not to be broken, shall with all their miscellaneous inscriptions endure for ever--yea, even to the great Day of Judgment.

If men will but look and listen, and feel and think--they will never forget anything worth being remembered. Do we forget "our children, that to our eyes are dearer than the sun?" Do we forget our wives--unreasonable and almost downright disagreeable as they sometimes will be? Do we forget our triumphs--our defeats--our ecstasies, our agonies--the face of a dear friend, or "dearest foe"--the ghost-like voice of conscience at midnight arraigning us of crimes--or her seraph hymn, at which the gates of heaven seem to expand for us that we may enter in among the white-robed spirits, and

"Summer high in bliss upon the hills of God?"

What are all the jottings that ever were jotted down on his jot-book, by the most inveterate jotter that ever reached a raven age, in comparison with the Library of Useful Knowledge, that _every_ man--who is a man--carries within the Ratcliffe--the Bodleian of his own breast?

What are you grinning at in the corner there, you little ugly Beelzebub of a Printer's Devil? and have you dropped through a seam in the ceiling? More copy do you want? There, you imp--vanished like a thought!

DR KITCHINER.

SECOND COURSE.

Above all things, continues Dr Kitchiner, "avoid travelling through the night, which, by interrupting sleep, and exposing the body to the night air, is always prejudicial, even in the mildest weather, and to the strongest constitutions." Pray, Doctor, what ails you at the night air?

If the night air be, even in the mildest weather, prejudicial to the strongest constitutions, what do you think becomes of the cattle on a thousand hills? Why don't all the bulls in Bashan die of the asthma--or look interesting by moonlight in a galloping consumption? Nay, if the night air be so very fatal, how do you account for the longevity of owls? Have you never read of the Chaldean shepherds watching the courses of the stars? Or, to come nearer our own times, do you not know that every blessed night throughout the year, thousands of young lads and lasses meet, either beneath the milk-white thorn--or on the lea-rig, although the night be ne'er sae wet, and they be ne'er sae weary--or under a rock on the hill--or--no uncommon case--beneath a frozen stack--not of chimneys, but of corn-sheaves--or on a couch of snow--and that they are all as warm as so many pies; while, instead of feeling what you call "the lack of vigour attendant on the loss of sleep, which is as enfeebling and as distressing as the languor that attends the want of food," they are, to use a homely Scotch expression, "neither to haud nor bind;" the eyes of the young lads being all as brisk, bold, and bright as the stars in Charles's Wain, while those of the young lasses shine with a soft, faint, obscure, but beautiful lustre, like the dewy Pleiades, over which nature has insensibly been breathing a mist almost waving and wavering into a veil of clouds?

Have you, our dear Doctor, no compassion for those unfortunate blades, who, _nolentes-volentes_, 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!

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 stalls--a picked bishop--a sacred band the elite 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 at--but 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 bully 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 his mouth so deranged by tippling that he simultaneously snorts, stutters, slavers and snores--pot-bellied--shanked like a spindle-strae--and bidding fair to be buried on or before Saturday week;--Be it a half-drunk horse-cowper, swinging to and fro in a wraprascal on a bit of broken-down blood that once won a fifty, every sentence, however short, having but two intelligible words, an oath and a lie--his heart rotten with falsehood, and his bowels burned up with brandy, so that sudden death 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 thriving 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 belly-ache, 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 foot-fall 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--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 the wood whose haunts he must thread no more--for the keepers were grim bone-breakers 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 wooden clog, a Preston Purrer;--so that Master Allonby is now far from being a beauty, with a face of that description attached to a head wagging from side to side under a powerful palsy, while the Mandarin drinks damnation to the Lord of the Manor in a horn of eleemosynary ale, handed to him by the village blacksmith, in days of old not the worst of the gang, and who, but for a stupid jury, a merciful judge, and something like prevarication in the circumstantial evidence, would have been hanged for a murderer--as he was--dissected, and hung in chains;--Be it a red-haired woman, with a pug nose, small fiery eyes, high cheekbones, bulging lips, and teeth like swine-tusks,--bearded--flat-breasted as a man--tall, scambling in her gait, but swift, and full of wild motions in her weather-withered arms, all starting 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--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 sow-gelder 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 self-same 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 sweetheart--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 tombstone, 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 expectation of the Tailor who played the principal part--and sense, feeling, memory, imagination, and reason, were all felled by one blow of fear--as butcher felleth ox--while by one of those mysteries, which neither we, nor you, nor anybody else, can understand, life remained not only unimpaired, but even invigorated; and there she sits, like a clock wound up to go a certain time, the machinery of which being good, has not been altogether deranged by the shock that sorely cracked the case, and will work till the chain is run down, and then it will tick no more;--Be it that tall, fair, lovely girl, so thin and attenuated that all wonder she can walk by herself--that she is not blown away even by the gentle summer breeze that wooes the hectic of her cheek--dying all see--and none better than her poor old mother--and yet herself thoughtless of the coming doom, and cheerful as a nest-building bird--while her lover, too deep in despair to be betrayed into tears, as he carries her to her couch, 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!

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 visitors 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 something 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 over-looks 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 thunderstorm 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 country, few thunderstorms are contented to pass over without killing at least one horse, some milch-kine, half-a-dozen sucking pigs or turkeys, an old woman or two, perhaps the Minister of the parish, a man about forty, name unknown, and a nursing mother at the ingle, the child escaping with singed eyebrows, and a singular black mark on one of its great toes. We say nothing of the numbers stupified, who awake the day after, as from a dream, with strange pains in their heads, and not altogether sure about the names or countenances of the somewhat unaccountable people whom they see variously employed about the premises, and making themselves pretty much at home. In towns, not one thunderstorm in fifty that performs an exploit more magnanimous than knocking down an old wife from a chimney-top--singeing a pair of worsted stockings that, knit in an ill-starred hour, when the sun had entered Aries, had been hung out to dry on a line in the backyard, 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 preferment.

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."

All this is very loosely stated, and must be set to rights. If you shut yourself up for some fifty hours or so in a mail-coach, that keeps wheeling along at the rate of ten miles an hour, and changes horses in half a minute, certainly for obvious reasons the less you eat and drink the better; and perhaps an hourly hundred drops of laudanum, or equivalent grain of opium, would be advisable, so that the transit from London to Edinburgh might be performed in a phantasma. But the free agent ought to live well on his travels--some degrees better, without doubt, than when at home. People seldom live very well at home. There is always something requiring to be eaten up, that it may not be lost, which destroys the soothing and satisfactory symmetry of an unexceptionable dinner. We have detected the same duck through many unprincipled disguises, 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 stimulus--but false that therefore less nourishment is required. Would Dr Kitchiner, if now alive, presume to say that it was right for him, who had sat all day with his feet on the fender, to gobble up, at six o'clock of the afternoon, as enormous a dinner as we who had walked since sunrise forty or fifty miles? Because our stimulus had been greater, was our nourishment to be less? We don't care a curse about stimulus. What we want, in such a case, is lots of fresh food; and we hold that, under such circumstances, a man with a sound Tory Church-and-King stomach and constitution cannot over-eat himself--no, not for his immortal soul.

We had almost forgot to take the deceased Doctor to task for one of the most free-and-easy suggestions ever made to the ill-disposed, how to disturb and destroy the domestic happiness of eminent literary characters. "An introduction to eminent authors may be obtained," quoth he slyly, "from the booksellers 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 intercourse should be brought about freely and of its own accord, as fortunate circumstances permit, and there should be no impertinent interference of selfish or benevolent go-betweens. It would seem that Dr Kitchiner thought the commonest traveller, one who was almost, as it were, bordering on a Bagman, had nothing to do but call on the publisher of any great writer, and get a free admission into his house. Had the Doctor not been dead, we should have given him a severe rowing and blowing-up for this vulgar folly; but as he is dead, we have only to hope that the readers of the Oracle who intend to travel will not degrade themselves, and disgust "authors of eminence," by thrusting their ugly or comely faces--both are equally odious--into the privacy of gentlemen who have done nothing to exclude themselves from the protection of the laws of civilised society--or subject their fire-sides to be infested by one-half of the curious men of the country, two-thirds of the clever, and all the blockheads.

DR KITCHINER.

THIRD COURSE.

Having thus briefly instructed travellers how to get a look at Lions, the Doctor suddenly exclaims--"IMPRIMIS, BEWARE OF DOGS!" "There have,"