in reeking sausages - he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure — and for such a tomb might be content to die.

He is the best of sapors. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too transcendent

a delight, if not sinful, yet so like 5 to sinning, that really a tender-conscienced person would do well to pause too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach her-like lovers' kisses, she biteth—she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish - but she stoppeth at the palate 10 she meddleth not with the appetite. and the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for a mutton chop.

Piglet me speak his praise is no less provocative of the appetite, than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the 15 weakling refuseth not his mild juices.

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another.

means extend, all around.

He is all neighbours' fare.

He helpeth, as far as his little 20 He is the least envious of banquets.

I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great 25 an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those "tame villatic fowl"), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I 30 love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, "give everything." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours, to

5

extradomiciliate, or send out of the house, slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what), a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate. It argues an insensibility.

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plumcake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was over 10 London Bridge) a grey-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt at this time of day that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of selfdenial, and the very coxcombry of charity, schoolboy-like, I made him a present of― the whole cake! I walked on a 15 little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction; but before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a stranger, that I had 20 never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that II myself, and not another would eat her nice cake and what should I say to her the next time I saw her - how naughty I was to part with her pretty 25 present and the odour of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last- and I blamed my impertinent 30 spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness, and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey impostor.

-

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something

of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like 5 refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto —

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with 10 much learning and pleasantry on both sides, "Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in 15 using that method of putting the animal to death?" I forget the decision.

Decidedly, a few bread

His sauce should be considered. crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But, banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the 20 whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are - but consider, he is a weaklinga flower.

25

XX. ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN

Not many nights ago I had come home from seeing this extraordinary performer in Cockletop; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of it, by conjuring up the most opposite associations. I resolved to be 30

serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life; private misery,

public calamity.

All would not do.

There the antic sate

Mocking our state

all the strange

5 his queer visnomy-his bewildering costume things which he had raked together - his serpentine rod, swagging about in his pocket — Cleopatra's tear, and the rest

of his relics - O'Keefe's wild farce, and his wilder commentary - till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved 10 itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance it had driven away.

But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hun15 dred, were dancing before me, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium - all the strange combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the 20 town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke ! A season or two since there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far short of 25 the former.

There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one it is!) of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down, and call his. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unaccountable warfare with 30 your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not so much a comedian, as a company. If his name could be multiplied like his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone,

literally makes faces: applied to any other person, the phrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human countenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be surprised to see him some day put 5 out the head of a river-horse; or come forth a pewit, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis.

I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry - in Old Dornton-diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man; when 10 he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no 15 followers. The school of Munden began, and must end with himself.

Can any man wonder, like him? can any man see ghosts, like him? or fight with his own shadow SESSA as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Preston 20 - where his alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a preternatural interest over the common- 25 est daily-life objects? A table, or a joint stool, in his conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It is invested with constellatory importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, 30 rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by