and the metaphysical Lord D. offend in the double capacity of Lords and of Irishmen. Why the devil don't they write in Irish? they would be just as intelligible; or some professional writer might live by their translation. Is it not enough to put commoner authors down in person, but we must have vicarious authors into the bargain in high life? Besides, is not this fraudulent putting forward of a great name a getting of money under false pretences a cheat on the public, who pay so generously for aristocratic books, which would be left for ever on the shelf if not written by a Right Honourable? Does his Lordship hope that any plebeian can so far imitate the style of a peer as to deceive the people of fashion? Oh! my dear dear, Lord, this is indeed "too bad." It is pleasant, but wrong-" reform it altogether."

But, to come back to the lost sheep of Parnassus,-this overstocking of the literary population is the more grievous, inasmuch as there is so little prospect of a remedy, natural or parliamentary, short of an ad internecionem starvation. Writers are shut out of almost every European state. Austria, which has provided so liberally for fighting Irishmen,-making one a Field-marshal and another a Count of the Holy Roman Empire,-would look very queer át a publishing recruit. The Pope, maugre his Catholicity, would put him on the Index as one of the radicali del secolo; and the Spaniard would clap him into the Inquisition for treating Emancipation as a revolutionary and unjesuitical question. In France they have also pretty well overstocked their own market, and the booksellers give no prices. Then again, literature, unlike agriculture, has no spade cultivation to provide for superfluous hands; and if an Irish author should strive to earn a livelihood by dropping back into the rear ranks of society, and should turn his ambitious tendencies at climbing up a bricklayer's ladder, he will but escape out of the frying-pan into the fire. In America, a market is scarcely yet open sufficient to meet the views of the literary emigrant. Yet this is all that remains for us; and I would press it upon Mr. Wilmot Horton, since he will take the bull by the horns, to begin with this the least unmanageable branch of the subject. If he can reduce the literary population of Ireland, it will encourage him to proceed with the rest of the peasantry. It would only require to engage Murray or Colburn to settle in America, and the authors would follow instinctively, like flies after the honey. But then, it will be said, how are we to do this, and keep the home-market in a supply of bibliopoles? "Ay, that's the rub!" Suppose, then, we have a joint-stock company for the encouragement of literature in the back-settlements. Jointstock companies, to be sure, are out of fashion, but the case is desperate. Over-population is the master-vice of the nineteenth century; and Hippocrates writes that extreme diseases require extreme remedies. M.

August.-VOL. XXIII. NO. XCH.

L

LONDON LYRICS.

Table Talk.

To weave a culinary clue,
Whom to eschew, and what to chew,
Where shun, and where take rations,
I sing. Attend, ye diners-out,
And, if my numbers please you, shout
"Hear, hear!" in acclamations.
There are who treat you, once a year,
To the same stupid set: good cheer
Such hardship cannot soften.
To listen to the self-same dunce,
At the same leaden table, once
Per Annum's once too often.
Rather than that, mix on my plate
With men I like the meat I hate-
Colman with pig and treacle;
Luttrell with venʼson-pasty join,
Lord Normanby with orange wine,
And rabbit-pie with Jekyll.
Add to George Lambe a sable snipe,
Conjoin with Captain Morris tripe,
By parsley-roots made denser:
Mix Macintosh with mack'rel, with
Calves-head and bacon Sydney Smith,
And mutton-broth with Spencer.
Shun sitting next the wight whose drone
Bores, sotto voce, you alone

With flat colloquial pressure:
Debarr'd from general talk, you droop
Beneath his buzz, from orient Soup
To occidental Cheshire.

He who can only talk with one,
Should stay at home and talk with none-

At all events, to strangers,
Like village epitaphs of yore,

He ought to cry, " Long time I bore,"
To warn them of their dangers.
There are whose kind inquiries scan
Your total kindred, man by man,
Son, brother, cousin, joining.

They ask about your wife, who's dead,
And eulogize your uncle Ned,

Who died last week for coining.
When join'd to such a son of prate,
His queries I anticipate,

And thus my lee-way fetch up-
"Sir, all my relatives, I vow,
Are perfectly in health-and now

I'd thank you for the ketchup!"
Others there are who but retail
Their breakfast journal, now grown stale,
In print ere day was dawning:

When folks like these sit next to me,
They send me dinnerless to tea;

One cannot chew while yawning.

Seat not good talkers one next one,
As Jacquier beards the Clarendon ;
Thus shrouded you undo 'em:
Rather confront them, face to face,
Like Holles Street and Harewood Place,
And let the town run through 'em.

Poets are dangerous to sit nigh;
You waft their praises to the sky,

And when you think you're stirring
Their gratitude, they bite you.—(That's
The reason I object to cats;

They scratch amid their purring.)
For those who ask you if you "malt,"
Who" beg your pardon" for the salt,
And ape our upper grandees,

By wondering folks can touch port wine:
That, reader, 's your affair, not mine;
I never mess with dandies.

Relations mix not kindly; shun
Inviting brothers; sire and son
Is not a wise selection:
Too intimate, they either jar
In converse, or the evening mar
By mutual circumspection.
Lawyers are apt to think the view
That interests them must interest you;
Hence they appear at table

Or supereloquent, or dumb,
Fluent as nightingales, or mum

As horses in a stable.

When men amuse their fellow guests
With Crank and Jones, or Justice Best's
Harangue in Dobbs and Ryal;

The host, beneath whose roof they sit,
Must be a puny judge of wit,

Who grants them a new trial.
Shun technicals in each extreme:
Exclusive talk, whate'er the theme,
The proper boundary passes:
Nobles as much offend, whose clack's
For ever running on Almack's,
As brokers on molasses.

I knew a man, from glass to delf,
Who talk'd of nothing but himself,
"Till check'd by a vertigo:

The party who beheld him "floor'd,"
Bent o'er the liberated board,

And cried, "Hic jacet ego."

Some aim to tell a thing that hit
Where last they dined; what there was wit
Here meets rebuffs and crosses.

Jokes are like trees; their place of birth
Best suits them; stuck in foreign earth,
They perish in the process.

Think, reader, of the few who groan
For any ailments save their own:

The world, from peer to peasant,
Is heedless of your cough or gout;
Then pri'thee, when you next dine out,
Go arm'd with something pleasant.

Nay, even the very soil that nursed
The plant, will sometimes kill what erst
It nurtured in full glory.
Like causes will not always move
To similar effects: to prove
The fact I'll tell a story.

Close to that spot where Stuart turns
His back upon the clubs and spurns

The earth, a marble fixture,

We dined: well match'd, for pleasure met,
Wits, poets, peers, a jovial set

In miscellaneous mixture.

Each card turn'd up a trump, the glee,
The catch went round, from eight to three,
Decorum scorn'd to own us;

We joked, we banter'd, laugh'd, and roar'd,
Till high above the welkin soar'd
The helpmate of Tithonus.

Care kept aloof, each social soul
A brother hail'd, Joy fill'd the bowl,
And humour crown'd the medley,

Till Royal Charles, roused by the fun,
Look'd toward Whitehall, and thought his son
Was rioting with Sedley.

"Gad, John, this is a glorious joke-"
(Thus to our host his Highness spoke)-
"The Vicar with his Nappy

Would give an eye for this night's freak-
Suppose we meet again next week-"
John bow'd, and was "too happy."

The day arrived-'twas seven-we met :
Wits, poets, peers, the self-same set,
Each hail'd a joyous brother.
But in the blithe and debonnaire,
Saying, alas! is one affair,

And doing is another.

Nature unkind, we turn'd to Art;
Heavens! how we labour'd to be smart:

Zug sang a song in German :

We might as well have play'd at chess:
All dropp'd, as dead-born from the press
As last year's Spital sermon.

Ah! Merriment! when men entrap
Thy bells, and women steal thy cap,
They think they have trepann'd thee.
Delusive thought! aloof and dumb,
Thou wilt not at a bidding come,
Though Royalty command thee.

The rich, who sigh for thee; the great,
Who court thy smiles with gilded plate,

But clasp thy cloudy follies:

I've known thee turn, in Portman-square,
From Burgundy and Hock, to share
A pint of Port at Dolly's.

Races at Ascot, tours in Wales,
White-bait at Greenwich ofttimes fail,

To wake thee from thy slumbers.
Ev'n now, so prone art thou to fly,
Ungrateful nymph! thou 'rt fighting shy
Of these narcotic numbers.

MISADVENTURES OF A SHORT-SIGHTED MAN.
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.

"It was in ignorance, Glo'ster's eyes being out."

King Lear, Act iv. Scene 5. I DO believe I am the most unfortunate man alive. I am ashamed of my name, and dare not use it. I have lost my fortune, my friends, my honour, and my wife. I am reviled as a spendthrift, pointed at as a pick-purse, and shunned as a libertine; and yet I am as guiltless of waste, of theft, and of profligacy, as the babe that has never seen this wasteful, thieving, and profligate world. Neither can I justly blame others for any of my misfortunes, excepting in one instance, and that the one to which I am the least sensible-the loss of fortune. I once even attributed that in part, and all the rest wholly, to my miserable luck in having been born extremely short-sighted. Unless I relate the principal adventures of my life, I cannot expect that any one should take my word for what sounds so improbable: I shall therefore write my story. It may reach the eyes or ears of some of my early friends, who may thus be induced to attend to an explanation of facts, and to do me a tardy justice. It may chance to cause some slight interest or amusement to the public. At all events, the recital will beguile a few hours of my tedious and solitary existence, and procure me once again, before I die, a feeling of my own importance, while I make myself the sad hero of the following sheets:

Reader, have I not said I am ashamed of my name? Then, do not expect me to divulge it. Thus much will I confess-it begins with a B; and, courteously allowing the confidence between us to be limited in this single respect, suffer me to be known to you only as Mr. B. of London; for I was born and bred in London, was apprenticed to a teamerchant in that city, went into business myself in the same place, lived and married there (only going to Islington for a very short honeymoon), and in London I probably shall die, shrouded in that obscurity in which I am now carefully hid, and where I am by this time (I almost hope) forgotten.

My father was a man well to do in the tea-trade. I was his only child; and, although he could have afforded to make a gentleman of me much better than probably he could have done had he been himself a gentleman, still his pride was not of that sort. It was to be respectable and respected in that walk of life in which his birth had cast him. He considered Trade and Wealth as elder and younger sisters, and would