theoretical, and hypochondriacal, like those whose more thinking stomachs drive them upon the apparently more innocent but less easy and analogous intercommunications of fruit and vegetables. For our parts, like all persons who think at all, -nay, like the butcher himself, when he catches himself in a strange fit of meditation, after some doctor perhaps has "kept him low,” we confess to an abstract dislike of eating the sheep and lamb that we see in the meadow; albeit our concrete regard for mutton is considerable, particularly Welsh mutton. But Nature has a beautiful way of reconciling all necessities that are unmalignant; and as butchers at present must exist, and sheep and lambs would not exist at all in civilized countries, and crop the sweet grass so long, but for the brief pang at the end of it, he is as comfortable a fellow as can be, one of the liveliest ministers of her mortal necessities, of the deaths

by which she gives and diversifies life; and has no more notion of doing any harm in his vocation than the lamb that swallows the lady-bird on the thyme. A very pretty insect is she, and has had a pretty time of it; a very calm, clear feeling, healthy, and there'fore happy little woollen giant, compared with her, is the lamb, her butcher; and an equally innocent and festive personage is the butcher himself, notwithstanding the popular fallacy about juries, and the salutary misgiving his beholders feel when they see him going to take the lamb out of the meadow, or entering the more tragical doors of the slaughterhouse. His thoughts, while knocking down the ox, are of skill and strength, and not of cruelty; and

We doubt even whether

the death, though it may not be the very best of deaths, is, assuredly, none of the worst. Animals, that grow old in an artificial state, would have a hard time of it in a lingering decay. Their mode of life would not have prepared them for it. Their blood would not run lively enough to the last. the John Bull of the herd, when about to be killed, would change places with a very gouty, irritable old gentleman; or be willing to endure a grievous being of his own sort, with legs answering to the gout; much less if Cow were to grow old with him, and plague him with endless lowings, occasioned by the loss of her beauty, and the increasing insipidity of the hay. A human being who can survive those ulterior vaccinations must indeed possess some great reliefs of his own, and deserve them; and life may reasonably be a wonderfully precious thing in his eyes: nor shall excuse be wanting to the vaccinators, and what made them such, especially if they will but grow a little more quiet and ruminating. But who would have the death of some old, groaning, aching, effeminate, frightened lingerer in life, such as Mæcenas for example, compared with a good, jolly knock-down blow, at a reasonable period, whether of hatchet or of apoplexy,—whether the bull's death or the butcher's? Our own preference, it is true, is for neither. We are for an excellent, healthy, happy life of the very best sort; and a death to match it, going out calmly as a summer's evening. Our taste is not particular; but we are for the knock-down blow rather than the death-in-life.

The butcher, when young, is famous for his health,

strength, and vivacity, and for his riding any kind of horse down any sort of hill, with a tray before him, the reins for a whip, and no hat on his head. It was a gallant of this sort that Robin Hood imitated, when he beguiled the poor sheriff into the forest, and showed him his own deer to sell. The old ballads apostrophize him well as the "butcher so bold," or better, with the accent on the last syllable, "thou bold butcher." No syllable of his was to be trifled with. The butcher keeps up his health in middle life, not only with the food that seems so congenial to flesh, but with rising early in the morning, and going to market with his own or his master's cart. When more sedentary, and very jovial and good-humored, he is apt to expand into a most analogous state of fat and smoothness, with silken tones and a short breath,

- harbingers, we fear, of asthma and gout; or the kindly apoplexy comes, and treats him as he treated the ox.

When rising in the world, he is indefatigable on Saturday nights; walking about in the front of those white-clothed and joint-abounding open shops, while the meat is being half-cooked beforehand with the gas-lights. The rapidity of his "What-d'ye-buy?" on these occasions, is famous; and both he and the good housewives, distracted with the choice before them, pronounce the legs of veal "beautiful, — exceedingly."

How he endures the meat against his head as he carries it about on a tray, or how we endure that he should do it, or how he can handle the joints as he does with that habitual indifference, or with what

floods of hot water he contrives to purify himself of the exoterical part of his philosophy on going to bed, we cannot say; but, take him all in all, he is a fine specimen of the triumph of the general over the particular.

The only poet that was the son of a butcher (and the trade may be proud of him) is Akenside, who naturally resorted to the "Pleasures of Imagination." As to Wolsey, we can never quite picture him to ourselves apart from the shop. He had the cardinal butcher's-virtue of a love of good eating, as his picture shows; and he was foreman all his life to the butcher Henry the Eighth. We beg pardon of the trade for this application of their name; and exhort them to cut the cardinal, and stick to the poet.

187

A PINCH OF SNUFF.

ILL the reader take a pinch of snuff with us?
Reader. With pleasure.

Editor. How do you like it?

Reader. Extremely fine! I never saw such snuff. Editor. Precisely so. It is of the sort they call Invisible; or, as the French have it, tabac imaginaire,―imaginary snuff. No macuba equals it. The tonquin bean has a coarse flavor in comparison. To my thinking, it has the hue of Titian's orange-color, and the very tip of the scent of sweet-brier.

Reader. In fact, one may perceive in it just what one pleases, or nothing at all.

Editor. Exactly that.

Reader. Those who take no snuff whatever, or even hate it, may take this, and be satisfied. Ladies, nay brides, may take it.

Editor: You apprehend the delicacy of it to a nicety. You will allow, nevertheless, by virtue of the same fineness of perception, that even when you discern, or choose to discern, neither hue, scent, nor substance in it, still there is a very sensible pleasure realized the moment the pinch is offered. that which is pass

Reader. True, the good-will,

ing between us two now.