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MULLION.

Well, sir, an ultra fit of candour every now and then seizes on him, and he panegyrizes Hook's wit. "I don't like the man, sir," he says-" I don't like the man; but do him justice; let us be fair; he is a droll fellow, sir—a droll fellow; he tells you a good thing-a devilish good thing now-ha, ha, ha!—a most excellent thing. You know he was at the Isle of France; ay, and he came back from the Isle of France too-ha, ha, ha! and we all know whyha, ha, ha! Well, then, coming home, he stopped at the Cape of Good-Hope -some place in India, you know-where he met Charles Somerset. Says Charles to him, Why, Hook,' says he, what the devil,' says he, brings you home? I hope,' says he, it is nothing ails your liver? Well now, just mind what Hook said-devilish good-very good, faith-I don't like the man, sir -I don't like the man; but let us be fair; he is a droll fellow, sir-a droll fellow. No,' says Hook, nothing ails my liver-never was better in my life,' says he; but there is a deficiency in my accounts, which I must go over to answer. Ha, ha, ha! Devilish good, was it not? When I heard it first, everybody laughed. Ha, ha, ha!"

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TICKLER.

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You are a capital mimic, Mullion. I wish Mathews had that story.

NORTH.

No, no; it would be scandalous to bring a prince of the blood on the stage. Remember that he is a son of George III., and brother of George IV.

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Who, by the way, regularly laugh at the joke, whenever it pleases the Duke to tell it. It is his highness's best story, and is always told on great occasions, state days, holidays, and the like.

NORTH.

Come, gentlemen, change the subject, if you please. I do not like to hear anything disparaging to any son of HIM, who, no matter what king may reign, shall be king of my heart to the end of the chapter.

Come, fill up your wine,
Look, fill it like mine;
Here, boys, I begin,

A good health to the KING!

Tims, see it go round,

Whilst with mirth we abound.

Chorus.

For we will be dull and heavy no more,

Since wine does increase, and there's claret good store.

Nay, don't us deceive

ODOHERTY.

Upon honour, I filled a bumper from the foundation.

NORTH.

I did not address you, my good fellow. I spoke to Mullion, who is fighting shy; but do not interrupt me.

Nay, don't us deceive,

Why this will you leave?

The glass is not big,

What the deuce, you're no whig.

Come, drink up the rest,

Or be merry at least,

Chorus.

For we will be dull and heavy no more,

Since wine does increase, and there's claret good store.

TICKLER.

Out of Pills to Purge Melancholy, if I mistake not ?

NORTH.

Yes, from the aforesaid. It was a favourite chaunt of worthy Dr Webster, some forty years ago, when we used to meet in the Gude Auld Town, at the White Horse in the Canongate. Many a scene I have got through since the Aughty-Three." And I said, the days of my youth, where are they? And Echo answered, Where are they."

ODOHERTY.

Pr'ythee, no more of your antediluvian recollections-your dramas of the ancient world.

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2.

We have laughed,

We have quaffed,

We have raked it fore and aft,

But out of pleasure's bowl have not emptied all the draught.

Never mind

Days behind,

But still before the wind,

Float after jolly souls, full flasks, and lasses kind.

BULLER.

Extempore? Stans pede in uno?

ODOHERTY.

Yes, on honour. I was seized with a fit of poetical fury.

BULLER.

You are almost as great as Pistrucci himself.

ODOHERTY.

I knock under to Coleridge only; for he makes verses asleep. I make music sometimes in that state, but never poetry.

NORTH.

Have you heard Coleridge's late epitaph on himself, which he composed in that way?

No. Repeat it.

TICKLER.

NORTH.

Here lies poor Cole, at length and without screaming,
Who died, as he was always wont, a-dreaming;
Shot, as with pistol, by the gout within,

Alone, and all unknown, at Embro' in an inn.

TICKLER.

"Alone, and all unknown, at Embro' in an inn." How mournful and musical. I hope, before the day comes when my epitaph will be required for him, he will have the firmness to put forth his strength, and take his place among our great men.

MULLION.

What are you thinking of, Ensign ?-You don't hear what anybody says to you. You did not hear the Epitaph.

ODOHERTY.

Beg your pardon-beg your pardon a thousand times over-I was looking at these prints-they're new ones surely-What the devil are they?

NORTH.

Pooh! they're some new affairs-materials that Dr Mullion has got together for his Lectures on the Fine Arts.

ODOHERTY.

Oh! is that the case ?-What are the subjects, pray?

MULLION.

Don't you see well enough what they are?-why, they're the new set of prints come out by way of illustrations to Leigh Hunt's poem of "The Choice," in the last Liberal. I shall lecture on them one of these days.

ODOHERTY.

The artist?

MULLION.

Nay, as to that I can't say-There's no name to the article; but 'tis whispered that they are Haydon's.

ODOHERTY.

Haydon's?-Impossible!-impossible-not the least like his style. Why they seem to be mere caricatures.

MULLION.

Not a bit-I assure you 'tis all dead earnest. There is much gusto about them a fine free sweep of pencil-a delicate sense of the grace of thingsThey're very pretty sweet prints. I intend to make Ambrose a present of them after my lecture is fairly done and delivered.

ODOHERTY.

By jingo, I can't make either head or tail of these things. There should have been a motto, or something, at the bottom, to let one into the artist's meaning. What, now, is this here one, Mullion?

MULLION.

There are mottoes to each of them, taken from the poem itself; but the frame-maker has, by some mistake, covered them with his pasteboard and gilding. Here, however, is the Liberal, No IV.-I believe I can easily point out the appropriate passages for your benefit.

ODOHERTY.

That's a good fellow. Well, then, what is the bit alluded to here?—(I haven't seen the last Liberal myself yet.)

MULLION.

This print, sir, represents his Majesty of Cockaigne in the attitude of doing what he says in this poem he is very fond of-admiring Nature.

ODOHERTY.

NATURE?-Why, he's at the tea-table.

MULLION.

No matter he's admiring the "Goal of life.”

ODOHERTY.

The Bowl of life you mean he has the Slop-basin in his dexter paw.

MULLION.

Well-and what should he have? He is talking in the poem about bowers and showers, and treeses and breezes, and so forth; and he breaks out into this fine apostrophe-which is the motto to your print.

"Come then, ye scenes of quiet and content,
Ye Goals of life, on which our hearts are spent,
Meet my worn eyes—I LOVE YOU EVEN IN VALES
OF CUPS AND SAUCERS, AND SUCH Delfic DALES-

Are not they sweet, natural lines?

ODOHERTY.

"

Why, Wales is a pretty country-and, I dare say, even on delft-ware, such as he seems to have on his table, the representation yet may be charming. Seriously, this print gives us an amicable idea of his Majesty.

KEMPFERHAUSEN.

Dear divine enthusiast! Well, only to think of people making a laughingstock of this innocent-hearted, good, worthy, gentle soul, that is quite happy, quite upon the air, with having a rural peep of a few blue trees and cottages on a piece of crockery ware! For shame! for shame!

ODOHERTY.

What the deuce is this grand roll, North?

NORTH.

You talk of Dr Mullion's lectures-I would have you know, I mean to cut in upon that series of his myself-In a word, here goes my lecture on these prints, and on the poem from which they sprung. I shall read it to youListen, boys!—

Mr North's Lecture on " The Choice;" a Poem recently written by Leigh Hunt, a Convert, and Vice-Poet-Laureate to Blackwood's Magazine.

OUR innumerable delightful qualities of head and heart, and, above all, our invincible good nature, have at last made a complete convert of Leigh Hunt, and he is never happy except when lauding Blackwood's Magazine to the seventh heaven. No sooner does he put on his yellow breeches, in the morning early, than he trips crisply down from his attic story into the breakfast-parlour, and seasons every mouthful of muffin with the mustard of Ebony. He cannot write a note to Mr Pygmalion the painter, or Mistress Molly the charewoman, without trumpeting our praises; and will sit up for hours together in his bed, with his perked-up mouth, and swaling night-cap,gazing himself away through an opening in the dimity, on a striking likeness of us, sketched by our common friend Haydon, during his last visit to Scotland. He is absolutely possessed -haunted-waylaid-bed-ridden, not by an Incubus, God forbid, but by a most affable and benign spirit, hight Christopher North, who purifies, by gentle ministrations, the corVOL. XIV.

ruptions of his Cockney blood, and so fills his brain with " fancies chaste and noble," that he is henceforth appointed our Vice-Poet-Laureate, with a salary of four gallons of gin-twist, and a keg of best Dunbar red-herrings, to be paid at Hampstead "at ten of April morn, by the chime." Let no envious railer scoff at Leigh Hunt as a placeman and pensioner. No doubt, the situation is a lucrative one, and, with judicious economy, our laureate, if he may not live upon it and lay by money, cannot fail to become a richer man every year. He must not, however, buy any more busts of those " down-looking" Greeks, and we recommend him (if he has not done so already) to sell his piano-forte. He has but an indifferent ear for instrumental music, and tuning is expensive. The position, too, either of a man or a Cockney, at the ivories, is below the dignity of our laureate, and unworthy an eater of red-herrings. The barrel-organ is a preferable instrument; and we have heard that Mr Hunt's execution upon it is to be equalled only by his command over

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We refer such of our readers as may not have heard of Mr Leigh Hunt, to various papers in this miscellany with the signature Z. These will tell what he was; but we have his own words for what he wishes to be--and the following morceaux are from the intended life of our Vice-Laureate, adumbrated or shadowed forth in his beautiful poem, "The Choice."*

The poem opens with a panegyric upon Pomfret, the author of that great original poem The Choice, on which Mr Hunt's is modelled.

"I have been reading Pomfret's Choice

this spring,

A pretty kind of-sort-of-kind of thing,
Not much a verse, and poem none at all,
Yet, as they say, extremely natural.
And yet I know not. There's a skill in
pies,

In raising crusts as well as galleries; And he's the poet, more or less, who knows

The charm that hallows the least thing

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"Mild singing clothes." What are they? Not surely your yellow breeches, Mister Hunt. Perhaps caps and bells. Are kilts mild singing clothes? Petticoats are liker the thing, when they rustle. The two last lines are not original, but filched from the Filcher. The were shewn publicly in prose by the New Pygmalion some time ago, that is, without their mild singing clothes. And pray, our good ViceLaureate, what may they mean?— When a Cockney chucks a country wench under the chin, and gloats upon

her linsey-woolsey petticoat, call you that "poetry"? The author of Rimini ought to know better; but we hope that he is merely shamming innocence to please us; in which hope we are strengthened by the subsequent strapping Alexandrine

"The ladies rise in heaps, and give them sweet admissions!"

A little farther on, our Vice shews he is no such simpleton about such affairs as he would pretend to be; but, on the contrary, somewhat peevishly complains, that, in the present day, a man cannot write lusciously and liquorishly without being shook by the ears, or nose-pulled by some Z. or other.

"Else I would print my fancy by itself, And be a love' on every lady's shelf; Perhaps I shall be so, some day or other," &c.

Promiscuous concubinage not yet being the order of the day, the publication of the "loves" alluded to is deferred till a fitter opportunity; and meanwhile the Vice writes, he tells us, such verses as "smile on tables in the parson's nose." For smile, nostro periculo, read smell. How elegant the use of the word parson! And, altogether, what dignified and gentlemanly ease does Mr Hunt exhibit in these his "mild singing clothes!" Instead of one, he shall have two kegs of Dunbar reds.

But now for him. Hear-hearhear!

"First, on a green I'd have a low, broad house,

Just seen by travellers through the garden boughs;

And that my luck might not seem ill bestow'd,

A bench and spring should greet them on the road.

grounds should not be large; I like

to go

My
To Nature for a range, and prospect too,
And cannot fancy she'll comprise for me,
Even in a park, her all-sufficiency:
Besides, my thoughts fly far; and when

at rest,

Love, not a watch-tower, but a lulling

nest.

But all the ground I had should keep a look

Of Nature still, have birds'-nests and a brook;

* See Liberal, No. IV.

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