Charles. Shouldn't be always on the wing-that's of my horse, it forced out the cork with a prodigious being too flighty. He, he, he! Do you take, good sir pop full in the face of my gallant commander. -do you take?

Olla. Happening to be at home-rainy day-no going out to sport, blister, shoot, nor bleed-was busy behind the counter. You know my shop, Sir Charles-gentleman in. [Exit Foss.] The country, then, has Galen's head over the door-new gilt him last week, by the by-looks as fresh as a pill.

Churchwarden Posh, of our town, being ill of an indigestion from eating three pounds of measly pork at Olla. Madam, I have the honour of paying my a vestry dinner, I was making up a cathartic for the respects. Sweet spot, here, among the cows; good for patient, when who should strut into the shop but consumptions-charming woods hereabouts-pheasants Lieutenant Grains, the brewer-sleek as a dray-horse- flourish-so do agues-sorry not to see the good in a smart scarlet jacket, tastily turned up with a lieutenant-admire his room-hope soon to have his rhubarb-coloured lapel. I confess his figure struck me. company. Do you take, good madam-do you take? I looked at him as I was thumping the mortar, and Luc. I beg, sir, you will be seated. felt instantly inoculated with a military ardour.

And on the label of the stuff

He wrote this verse,

Which one would think was clear enough,

And terse:

When taken,

To be well shaken.

Next morning early, Bolus rose,
And to the patient's house he goes
Upon his pad,

Who a vile trick of stumbling had :
It was, indeed, a very sorry hack;

But that's of course;

For what's expected from a horse,
With an apothecary on his back?
Bolus arrived, and gave a doubtful tap,
Between a single and a double rap.

Knocks of this kind

Are given by gentlemen who teach to dance;
By fiddlers, and by opera-singers;
One loud, and then a little one behind,
As if the knocker fell by chance

Out of their fingers.

The servant lets him in with dismal face,
Long as a courtier's out of place-

Portending some disaster;

John's countenance as rueful looked and grim,
As if the apothecary had physicked him,
And not his master.

'Well, how's the patient?' Bolus said;
John shook his head.

'Indeed!-hum !-ha!-that's very odd!
He took the draught?' John gave a nod.
'Well, how? what then? speak out, you dunce!'
"Why, then,' says John, 'we shook him once.'
'Shook him!-how?' Bolus stammered out.

"We jolted him about.'

'Zounds! shake a patient, man!--a shake won't do.' 'No, sir, and so we gave him two.'

'Two shakes! od's curse!

"Twould make the patient worse.'

'It did so, sir, and so a third we tried.'

The doctor looked wise: A slow fever,' he said:
Prescribed sudorifics and going to bed.

'Sudorifics in bed,' exclaimed Will, are humbugs!
I've enough of them there without paying for drugs!'

Will kicked out the doctor; but when ill indeed,
E'en dismissing the doctor don't always succeed;
So, calling his host, he said: 'Sir, do you know,
I'm the fat single gentleman six months ago?

'Look 'e, landlord, I think,' argued Will with a grin,
"That with honest intentions you first took me in:
But from the first night-and to say it I'm bold-
I've been so hanged hot, that I'm sure I caught cold.'
Quoth the landlord: 'Till now I ne'er had a dispute;
'I've let lodgings ten years; I'm a baker to boot;
In airing your sheets, sir, my wife is no sloven;
And your bed is immediately over my oven.'

'The oven!' says Will. Says the host: 'Why this
passion?

In that excellent bed died three people of fashion. Why so crusty, good sir?' 'Zounds!' cries Will, in a taking,

'Who wouldn't be crusty with half a year's baking?'

MRS ELIZABETH INCHBALD.

MRS ELIZABETH INCHBALD, an actress, dramatist, and novelist, produced a number of popular plays. Her two tales, The Simple Story, and Ñature and Art, are the principal sources of her fame; but her light dramatic pieces are marked by various talent. Her

'Well, and what then?' Then, sir, my master died.' first production was a farce, entitled The Mogul Tale,

He entered his rooms, and to bed he retreated,
But all the night long he felt fevered and heated;
And though heavy to weigh, as a score of fat sheep,
He was not by any means heavy to sleep.

Next night 'twas the same; and the next, and the
next;

He perspired like an ox; he was nervous and vexed;
Week passed after week, till, by weekly succession,
His weakly condition was past all expression.

In six months his acquaintance began much to doubt
him;

For his skin, 'like a lady's loose gown,' hung about

him.

brought out in 1784, and from this time, down to 1805, she wrote nine other plays and farces. By some of these pieces-as appears from her memoirs -she received considerable sums of money. Her Things Are-her greatest dramatic performancefirst production realised £100; her comedy of Such brought her in £410, 12s.; The Married Man, £100; The Wedding Day, £200; The Midnight Hour, £130; Every One has his Fault, £700; Wives as they Were, and Maids as they Are, £427, 10s.; Lovers' Vows, £150; &c. The personal history of this lady is as singular as any of her dramatic plots. She was born of Roman Catholic parents residing at Standyfield, near Bury St Edmund's, in the year 1753. At the age of sixteen, full of giddy romance, she ran off to London, having with her a small sum of money, and some wearing-apparel in a band-box. After various adventures, she obtained an engagement for a country theatre, but suffering some personal indignities in her unprotected state, she applied to Mr Inchbald, an actor whom she had previously known. The gentleman counselled marriage. But who would marry me?' cried the lady. I would,' replied her friend, if you would have me.' 'Yes, sir, and would for ever be grateful'

and married they were in a few days. The union thus singularly brought about seems to have been happy enough; but Mr Inchbald died a few years afterwards. Mrs Inchbald performed the

first parts in the Edinburgh theatre for four years, in the country. He afterwards became a provincial and continued on the stage, acting in London, actor, and spent seven years in strolling about Dublin, &c., till 1789, when she quitted it for ever. England, in every variety of wretchedness, with Her exemplary prudence, and the profits of her different companies. In 1780, Holcroft appeared works, enabled her not only to live, but to save as an author, his first work being a novel, money. The applause and distinction with which entitled Alwyn, or the Gentleman Comedian. In the she was greeted never led her to deviate from her following year his comedy of Duplicity was acted simple and somewhat parsimonious habits. 'Last with great success at Covent Garden. Another Thursday,' she writes, I finished scouring my bed- comedy, the Deserted Daughter, experienced a very room, while a coach with a coronet and two footmen | favourable reception; but The Road to Ruin is waited at my door to take me an airing.' She universally acknowledged to be the best of his allowed a sister who was in ill health £100 a dramatic works. "This comedy,' says Mrs Inchyear. 'Many a time this winter,' she records in bald, 'ranks amongst the most successful of modern her diary, 'when I cried for cold, I said to myself: plays. There is merit in the writing, but much "But, thank God! my sister has not to stir from more in that dramatic science which disposes her room; she has her fire lighted every morning; character, scenes, and dialogue with minute attenall her provisions bought and brought ready cooked; tion to theatric exhibition.' Holcroft wrote a she is now the less able to bear what I bear; and great number of dramatic pieces-more than thirty how much more should I suffer but for this reflec- between the years 1778 and 1806; three other tion." This was noble and generous self-denial.novels (Anna St Ives, Hugh Trevor, and Bryan The income of Mrs Inchbald was now £172 per Perdue); besides A Tour in Germany and France, annum, and, after the death of her sister, she and numerous translations from the German, and went to reside in a boarding-house, where she French, and Italian. During the period of the enjoyed more of the comforts of life. Traces of French Revolution, he was a zealous reformer, and female weakness break out in her private memor-on hearing that his name was included in the same anda amidst the sterner records of her struggle for bill of indictment with Tooke and Hardy, he surrenindependence. The following entry is amusing: dered himself in open court, but no proof of guilt '1798. London. Rehearsing Lovers' Vows; happy, was ever adduced against him. His busy and but for a suspicion, amounting to a certainty, of a remarkable life was terminated on the 23d of March rapid appearance of age in my face.' Her last 1809. literary labour was writing biographical and critical prefaces to a collection of plays, in twenty-five volumes; a collection of farces, in seven volumes; and the Modern Theatre, in ten volumes. Phillips, the publisher, offered her £1000 for her memoirs, but she declined the tempting offer. This autobiography was, by her own orders, destroyed after her decease; but in 1833, her Memoirs were published by Mr Boaden, compiled from an autograph journal which she kept for above fifty years, and from her letters written to her friends. Mrs Inchbald died in a boarding-house at Kensington on the 1st of August 1821. By her will, dated four months before her decease, she left about £6000, judiciously divided amongst her relatives. One of her legacies marks the eccentricity of thought and conduct which was mingled with the talents and virtues of this original-minded woman: she left £20 each to her late laundress and hair-dresser, provided they should inquire of her executors concerning her

decease.

THOMAS HOLCROFT.

NOVELISTS.

It was natural that the genius and the success of the great masters of the modern English novel should have led to imitation. Mediocrity is seldom deterred from attempting to rival excellence, especially in any department that is popular, and may be profitable; and there is, besides, in romance, as in the drama, a wide and legitimate field for native talent and exertion. The highly wrought tenderness and pathos of Richardson, and the models of real life, wit, and humour in Fielding and Smollett, were succeeded by those of Sterne, while the fictions of Mackenzie, Dr Moore, Miss Burney, and Cumberland, are all greatly superior to the ordinary run of novels, and stand at the head of the second class. These writers, however, exercised but little influence on the national taste: they supported the dignity and respectability of the novel, but did not extend its dominion; and accordingly we find that there was a long dull period in which this delightful species of composition had sunk into general contempt. There was no lack of novels, but they were of a very inferior and even debased description. In place of natural incident, character, and dialogue, we had affected and ridiculous sentimentalism-plots utterly absurd or pernicious-and stories of love and honour so maudlin in conception and drivelling in execution, that it is surprising they could ever have been tolerated even by the most defective moral sense or taste. The circulating libraries in town and country swarmed with these worthless productions-known from their place of publication by the misnomer of the 'Minerva Press' novels-but their perusal was in a great measure confined to young people

THOMAS HOLCROFT, author of the admired comedy, The Road to Ruin, and the first to introduce the melodrama into England, was born in London on the 10th of December 1745. Till I was six years old,' says Holcroft, 'my father kept a shoemaker's shop in Orange Court; and I have a faint recollection that my mother dealt in greens and oysters.' Humble as this condition was, it seems to have been succeeded by greater poverty, and the future dramatist and comedian was employed in the country by his parents to hawk goods as a pedler. He was afterwards engaged as a stable-boy at Newmarket, and was proud of his new livery. A charitable person, who kept a school at Newmarket, of both sexes of imperfect education, or to half-idle taught him to read. He was afterwards a rider on the turf; and when sixteen years of age, he worked for some time with his father as a shoemaker. A passion for books was at this time predominant, and the confinement of the shoemaker's stall not agreeing with him, he attempted to raise a school

inquisitive persons, whose avidity for excitement was not restrained by delicacy or judgment. In many cases, even in the humblest walks of life, this love of novel-reading amounted to a passion as strong and uncontrollable as that of dram-drinking; and, fed upon such garbage as we have described,

it was scarcely less injurious; for it dwarfed the intellectual faculties, and unfitted its votaries equally for the study or relish of sound literature, and for the proper performance and enjoyment of the actual duties of the world. The enthusiastic novel-reader got bewildered and entangled among love-plots and high-flown adventures, in which success was often awarded to profligacy, and, among scenes of pretended existence, exhibited in the masquerade attire of a distempered fancy. Instead, therefore, of

Truth severe by fairy Fiction dressed,

we had Falsehood decked out in frippery and nonsense, and courting applause from its very

extravagance.

The first successful inroad on this accumulating mass of absurdity was made by Charlotte Smith, whose works may be said to hold a middle station between the true and the sentimental in fictitious composition. Shortly afterwards succeeded the political tales of Holcroft and Godwin, the latter animated by the fire of genius, and possessing great intellectual power and energy. The romantic fables of Mrs Radcliffe were also, as literary productions, a vast improvement on the old novels; and in their moral effects they were less mischievous, for the extraordinary machinery employed by the authoress was so far removed from the common course of human affairs and experience, that no one could think of drawing it into a precedent in ordinary

circumstances.

ROBERT PULTOCK.

Mr Southey has acknowledged that he took the idea of his Glendoveers, those winged celestial agents in the Curse of Kehama

The loveliest race of all of heavenly birth,

Hovering with gentle motion o'er the earth--

*

a Cornish Man: relating particularly his Shipwreck
near the South Pole; his wonderful Passage through a
subterraneous Cavern into a kind of New World; his
there meeting with a Gawrey, or Flying Woman, whose
Life he preserved, and afterwards married her; his
extraordinary Conveyance to the Country of Glumms
and Gawreys, or Men and Women that fly: likewise a
Description of this strange Country, with the Law,
Customs, and Manners of its Inhabitants, and the
Author's remarkable Transactions among them: taken
from his own Mouth on his Passage to England from off
Cape Horn in America, in the Ship Hector; with an
Introduction giving an Account of the surprising Manner
of his coming on Board that Vessel, and his Death on
his landing at Plymouth, in the year 1739; by R. S.,
a Passenger in the Hector. The initials 'R. S.' may
Gulliver's cousin, Richard Sympson-who stands
either have been designed to remind the reader of
inserted by an oversight of the author, who signs
sponsor for the redoubted Captain Lemuel-or
his proper initials, R. P., to the dedication and
introduction. The name of the hero, and the first
conception of the story, would seem to have been
suggested by Bishop Wilkins's Discovery of a New
World, in which there are speculations on the possi-
bility of a man being able to fly by the application
of wings to his body. (See vol. I. of this work,
Having taken up this idea of a flying
human race, Pultock modelled his story on that
p. 467.)
of Robinson Crusoe, making his hero a shipwrecked
for a time the sole inhabitant. The same virtues
voyager, cast upon a solitary shore, of which he was
of fortitude, resignation, and patient ingenuity are
assigned to both, with a depth and purity of
religious feeling in the case of Peter Wilkins which
was rare at that time in works of fiction. The
literal, minute, matter-of-fact style of Defoe is
copied with success; but except in his description
of the flying heroine, Pultock is inferior to the old
master. At least one half of the tale is felt to be
tedious and uninteresting. Its principal charm
consists in the lonely situation and adventures of
the hero, struggling with misfortunes and cut off
from society, and in the original and beautiful
conception of the flying woman, who comes, endowed
with all feminine graces and tenderness, to share
his solitude and affection. When Wilkins describes
the flying nation, their family alliances, laws,
customs, and mechanical works, the romance dis-
appears, and we see only a poor imitation of the
style or manner of Swift. The language of this
name of the country, Nosmnbdsgrsutt, is unpro-
new race is also singularly inharmonious.
nounceable, and glumm and gawrey, man and woman,
have nothing to recommend their adoption. The
flying apparatus is termed a graundee, and a flight

The

The locale of Wilkins's romance

from the neglected story of Peter Wilkins. The author of this story was long unknown; but in 1835, at a sale by auction of books and manuscripts which had belonged to Dodsley the publisher, the original agreement for the copyright of the work was found. The writer, it appears, was 'ROBERT PULTOCK of Clement's Inn, Gentleman;' and he had disposed of his tale for a sum of £20, with twelve copies of the work, and a set of the first impressions of the engravings that were to accompany it. The tale is dedicated to Elizabeth Countess of Northumberland-an amiable and accomplished lady, to whom Percy inscribed his Reliques, and Goldsmith the first printed copy of his Edwin and Angelina. To the countess, Pultock had been is a swangean. indebted for some personal favour-'a late instance is a grassy plain by the side of a lake, surrounded of benignity,' and it was after the pattern of her by a woody amphitheatre, behind which rises a virtues, he says, that he drew the mind of his huge naked rock, that towers up to a great height. heroine Youwarkee. Nothing more is known of In this retreat he constructs a grotto, and with Pultock. He was most probably a bachelor-a fruits and fish, subsists pleasantly during the solitary bencher-for had he left descendants, some summer. Winter approaches, and strange voices one of the number would have been proud to claim are heard. He sallies out one evening, and finds a the relationship. Having delivered his wild and beautiful woman near his door. This is Youwarkee, wondrous tale' to the world, he retired into modest the heroine. She had been engaged with a party and unbroken obscurity. The title of Pultock's of young people of the flying nation, resident on story may serve for an index to its nature and the other side of the great rock, chasing and incidents: The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, pursuing one another, when falling among the branches of a tree, her graundee became useless, and she sank to the ground stunned and senseless. The graundee, with its variety of ribs, drapery, and membrane, is described at length; but we may take the more poetical miniature sketch of it given by

* The first edition of Peter Wilkins is without the dedication. We were not aware of the exact date of this novel, else it would have been included in the previous section. The dates of the different editions are 1750, 1751, 1783, 1784, and several cheap

reprints have since been issued.