For his wit, which savours of the true attie, it comes in with the salt, but it is broached with the wine. He denies that beef is " a sore spoiler of your wit." He is witty because it is expected of him; but his wit is, at first, rather disagreeable and bitter; it is sauce piquante to your meat, and an olive to your wine. Like worm wood, the more you have of it, the less you dislike it, and you at last palate it. He takes care to say as many brilliant things as the dullards, his auditors, will be a week in retailing as their own ;-my lord takes all he says on books and women as his share; and my lady all he says on men as hers. For his suit, you instantly know it to be the livery of those elderly maiden ladies the Muses, to whose suite he is attached, con amore. His coat, once black, is, through long exposure, of a dun colour-the most disagreeable of all complexions to the eyes of a dunned poet. All things change! Its white button-moulds were once snugly enveloped in the best dark drab; but, after much struggling, they have at last protruded themselves into public notice; and as they more or less show their bony faces, remind us of the moon in her various quarters or phases. For the rest of his suit it is suitable; and is what painters call keeping with what I have just described. Most likely his stockings are of a rusty, mouse-coloured black; and his shoes are very like to be less brilliant than his head. Day and Martin would sneer at their poverty of polish, and fall to blessing their stars that they have more blacking than wit. His lodging is as high as his circumstances are low: its furniture will be hard to describe, seeing that it has none. His bed is a truckle one; he reconciles its poverty to himself; indeed he considers it poetical, for he remembers that that choice spirit Mercutio, preferred his truckle to a field bed. It lies immediately beneath a window that looks as much like a chess-board as a window, one pane being white, and giving as much light as its unclean dinginess will allow; and the next black (or blocked up like a late admiral's eye); the net-work of a cobweb serves as a ventilator in one corner, and Baxter's " Light to the Unconverted" darkens the skylight. He has a chair sans back; and a deal table, a deal too large for the most unscanted meal ever spread on it by its present possessor. Then he has a corner cupboard more for ornament than use;" an old-fashioned, lacquered, and gilt thing, like the Lord Mayor's coach, containing in its compartments two views of Chinese pagodas, and Mandarins, and tea-trees, and bridges, &c. the gilding nearly gone. Its non-contents are too numerous to mention; but its contents are— one plate and two-thirds of another, both very dusty from long disuse; two or three rusty odd knives and forks, the forks usually short in one prong, and pointless as Hacket's Epigrams; one cracked basin, a cream jug minus handle, and a tea-pot sans nose. The walls of his attic are not without their ornaments. On one side you shall perceive some half-dozen ballads and last words of notorious malefactors," pasted immovably against the wall by the last tenant, a son of St. Crispin, since hanged; on another side is the portrait of that most celebrated of all celebrated horses, Skewball, the decoration of a previous tenant, an outof-place groom. Over the fire-place is a portrait of Shakspeare, framed, but not glazed; in summer, after you have succeeded in brushing off the flies, to gain a look at it, you would suppose it to to be a dot engraving, but it is really an aquatint, the dotting is the work of Messieurs the Flies. He had till lately an old bust of 66 one John Milton, a blind man, who wrote a long poem;" the said Milton has since accidentally lost his nose as well as his eyes; but he consoles himself with its still resembling a poet, and calls it a Davenant. The manner and the occasion of the loss of the said nose are as follows:-it seems that a silly and uninformed mouse, ignorant that he had entered a poet's dormitory, while searching about the place with the near-sighted curiosity of a Bankes, was then and there discovered by the only companion of the poet's studies, an elderly and faithful tabby (the solitary gift of a rich old countess who never offered him a dinner), who, being much enraged at this gross ignorance of the mouse, in coming to such a place of starvation (forgetting that she was herself equally silly), flew indignantly at the said unwitting mouse, and in the hurry of her expedition overturned the head of her master's favourite Milton. A bust of Sappho stands in a nook by his bed-side. It was a long time draped by a thick, broad, black cobweb, which having fallen (for cobwebs as well as kingdoms must fall) upon her temples, she has now not taken the veil, but has had it given her. His library consists of many odd things and much literary lumber. The blank leaf of a copy of the " New Way to Pay Old Debts," is filled with a journal of debts, some of long standing and large amount, contracted before he was known to be a poet (for who would trust a poet?) His latter debts are small, and are kept on the back of the title-page. Among other items you will find these, which are here quoted, as apt instances of his poverty and his extravagance: It.-To Simon Wildgoose, tailor, for seating breeches -To Crispin Waxwell, for heel-tapping my pumps -To Diana Soaper, for one month's washing -To Miss Juliana Doriana Augustina Lena Selina 0 7 0 3/ Grafton*, for footing silk stockings three times 0 3 0 A copy of Thomson's "Castle of Indolence" is much dog's-eared and grease-spotted, from his repeatedly going to sleep over the second canto, which seems to have inspired the indolence it deprecates; the first canto is respectably clean, and its beauties are carefully under * A spinster lady, of high pretensions but low situation, who carries on the business of stocking-grafting, in a stall" under the Rose," a pot-house in Whitechapel. She is the reputed author of the following sentimental nouvellettes, as she calls them, (as it is conjectured, on account of their brevity,) printed at the Minerva press:-" The Night-light, or the Mysterious Chambermaid," 7 vols.; "The Tattered Shirt, or the Suspicious Washerwoman," 9 vols.; and “ The Yawning Hour: or the Pathetical, Sympathetical, and Peripatetical Patrole," 12 vols.; with many other, but less interesting productions. VOL. III. C lined. A copy of the same author's "For what's the worth of any thing, and though he makes a very ostentatious display of books, he never reads deeper into a volume than the title-page. For a long time our poet was afflicted with the Bibliomania; and during that period, all his talk, even his very dreams, were of Caxton and Wynkin-de-Worde. He could not buy rare books, but he could purchase priced catalogues of those which had been sold; and though his extravagance was sometimes bounded by his means, he never could resist purchasing a catalogue for ten shillings, even when his ten toes were covetous of its Russia-binding, for a cover to their semi-nudity. He was at length known by the distinguishing appellation of the Cat (or catalogue) hunter. He was sometimes told that he had more Cats than caught mice, yet he went on with his hobby. At length he discovered that he had really more catalogues than books: this gave the alarm to his pride, and partially cured him of his folly. Yet even now he is a more inveterate stall-hunter than any I-would-be-prebend in the three kingdoms; but a book-stall is his game: he'll scent you one at half a mile; and when he has run it down, noses it (from nearsightedness) for an hour or two before you can call him off, till he is as black in the hands (if not in the face) as a whitesmith. He has an instinctive faculty of tracking out a book-stall; the musty breath of an old Caaton is sweeter to his nose than the sigh of Roses; and a peep into a soiled " Mirror for Magistrates" is to him more picturesque than the Norfolk window of stained glass. Such are some of the eccentricities and whimsicalities of genius. Pocket Magazine. THE BROTHERS. A NARRATIVE FROM REAL LIFE. COUNT de B-, a Lieutenant-General in the French army, who died about the commencement of the Revolution, had lived on terms of intimacy with the two MM. de Belle-Isle, of whom he occasionally related interesting private anecdotes. The following are so extremely curious that they deserve to be recorded. The Count and the Chevalier de Belle-Isle were grandsons of the famous Intendant Fouquet; and, notwithstanding the disgrace of their grandfather, they were pretty well advanced in the military service at the death of Louis XIV. After the saturnalia of the regency, they became involved in the disasters of Le Blanc, the secretary of state for the war department, and the two brothers were arrested and put under close confinement in the Bastile To aggravate their misfortune, they |
