or

cities. In the country, few thunderstorms are contented to pass over without killing at least one horse, some milch-kine, half-a-dozen sucking pigs or turkeys, an old woman or two, perhaps the Minister of the parish, a man about forty, name unknown, and a nursing mother at the ingle, the child escaping with singed eyebrows, and a singular black mark on one of its great toes. We say nothing of the numbers stupified, who awake the day after, as from a dream, with strange pains in their heads, and not altogether sure about the names countenances of the somewhat unaccountable people whom they see variously employed about the premises, and making themselves pretty much at home. In towns, not one thunderstorm in fifty that performs an exploit more magnanimous than knocking down an old wife from a chimney-top-singeing a pair of worsted stockings that, knit in an ill-starred hour, when the sun had entered Aries, had been hung out to dry on a line in the backyard, or garden as it is called-or cutting a few inches off the tail of an old Whig weathercock that for years had been pecking the eyes out of all the airts the wind can blaw, greedy of some still higher preferment.

Our dear deceased author proceeds to tell his Traveller how to eat and drink; and remarks, "that people are apt to imagine that they may indulge a little more in high living when on a journey. Travelling itself, however, acts as a stimulus; therefore less nourishment is required than in a state of rest. What you might not consider intemperate at home, may occasion violent irritation, fatal inflammations, &c., in situations where you are least able to obtain medical assistance."

All this is very loosely stated, and must be set to rights. If you shut yourself up for some fifty hours or so in a mailcoach, that keeps wheeling along at the rate of ten miles an hour, and changes horses in half a minute, certainly for obvious reasons the less you eat and drink the better; and perhaps an hourly hundred drops of laudanum, or equivalent grain of opium, would be advisable, so that the transit from London to Edinburgh might be performed in a phantasma. But the free agent ought to live well on his travelsdegrees better, without doubt, than when at home. People seldom live very well at home. There is always something requiring to be eaten up, that it may not be lost, which

-some

destroys the soothing and satisfactory symmetry of an unexceptionable dinner. We have detected the same duck through many unprincipled disguises, playing a different part in the farce of domestic economy, with a versatility hardly to have been expected in one of the most generally despised of the web-footed tribe. When travelling at one's own sweet will, one feeds at a different inn every meal; and, except when the coincidence of circumstances is against you, there is an agreeable variety both in the natural and artificial disposition of the dishes. True that travelling may act as a stimulus-but false that therefore less nourishment is required. Would Dr Kitchiner, if now alive, presume to say that it was right for him, who had sat all day with his feet on the fender, to gobble up, at six o'clock of the afternoon, as enormous a dinner as we who had walked since sunrise forty or fifty miles? Because our stimulus had been greater, was our nourishment to be less? We don't care a curse about stimulus. What we want, in such a case, is lots of fresh food; and we hold that, under such circumstances, a man with a sound Tory Church-andKing stomach and constitution cannot over-eat himself—no, not for his immortal soul.

We had almost forgot to take the deceased Doctor to task for one of the most free-and-easy suggestions ever made to the ill-disposed, how to disturb and destroy the domestic happiness of eminent literary characters. "An introduction to eminent authors may be obtained," quoth he slyly, "from the booksellers who publish their works."

The booksellers who publish the works of eminent authors have rather more common sense and feeling, it is to be hoped, than this comes to-and know better what is the province of their profession. Any one man may, if he chooses, give any other man an introduction to any third man in this world. Thus the tailor of any eminent author-or his bookseller-or his parish minister-or his butcher-or his baker-or his man of business"-or his house-builder-may, one and all, give such travellers as Dr Kitchiner and others, letters of introduction to the said eminent author in prose or verse. This, we have heard, is sometimes done-but fortunately we cannot speak from experience, not being ourselves an eminent author. The more general the intercourse between men of taste, feeling, cultivation, learning, genius, the better; but

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that intercourse should be brought about freely and of its own accord, as fortunate circumstances permit, and there should be no impertinent interference of selfish or benevolent gobetweens. It would seem that Dr Kitchiner thought the commonest traveller, one who was almost, as it were, bordering on a Bagman, had nothing to do but call on the publisher of any great writer, and get a free admission into his house. Had the Doctor not been dead, we should have given him a severe rowing and blowing up for this vulgar folly; but as he is dead, we have only to hope that the readers of the Oracle who intend to travel will not degrade themselves, and disgust "authors of eminence," by thrusting their ugly or comely faces-both are equally odious-into the privacy of gentlemen who have done nothing to exclude themselves from the protection of the laws of civilised society—or subject their firesides to be infested by one-half of the curious men of the country, two-thirds of the clever, and all the blockheads.

DR KITCHINER.

THIRD COURSE.

HAVING thus briefly instructed travellers how to get a look at Lions, the Doctor suddenly exclaims—“ IMPRIMIS, BEWARE OF DOGS!" "There have," he says, "been many arguments, pro and con, on the dreadful disease their bite produces—it is enough to prove that multitudes of men, women, and children have died in consequence of having been bitten by dogs. What does it matter whether they were the victims of bodily disease or mental irritation? The life of the most humble human being is of more value than all the dogs in the world— dare the most brutal cynic say otherwise?"

Dr Kitchiner always travelled, it appears, in chaises; and a chaise of one kind or other he recommends to all his brethren of mankind. Why, then, this intense fear of the canine species? Who ever saw a mad dog leap into the mailcoach, or even a gig? The creature, when so afflicted, hangs his head, and goes snapping right and left at pedestrians. Poor people like us, who must walk, may well fear hydrophobia-though, thank Heaven, we have never, during the course of a tolerably long and well-spent life, been so much as once bitten by "the rabid animal!" "But what have rich authors, who loll in carriages, to dread from dogs, who always go on foot? We cannot credit the very sweeping assertion, that multitudes of men, women, and children have died in consequence of being bitten by dogs. Even the newspapers do not run up the amount above a dozen per annum, from which you may safely deduct two-thirds. Now, four men, women, and children, are not "a multitude." Of those four, we may set down two as problematical-having died, it is true, in, but not of hydrophobia-states of mind and body wide as the poles asunder. He who drinks two bottles of pure

spirit every day he buttons and unbuttons his breeches, generally dies in a state of hydrophobia-for he abhorred water, and knew instinctively the jug containing that insipid element. But he never dies at all of hydrophobia, there being evidence to prove that for twenty years he had drank nothing but brandy. Suppose we are driven to confess the other twowhy, one of them was an old woman of eighty, who was dying as fast as she could hobble, at the very time she thought herself bitten-and the other a nine-year-old brat, in hooping-cough and measles, who, had there not been such a quadruped as a dog created, would have worried itself to death before evening, so lamentably had its education been neglected, and so dangerous an accomplishment is an impish temper. The twelve cases for the year of that most horrible disease, hydrophobia, have, we flatter ourselves, been satisfactorily disposed of eight of the alleged deceased being at this moment engaged at various handicrafts, on low wages indeed, but still such as enable the industrious to live-two having died of drinking-one of extreme old age, and one of a complication of complaints incident to childhood, their violence having, in this particular instance, been aggravated by neglect and devilish temper. Where now the "multitude" of men, women, and children, who have died in consequence of being bitten by mad dogs?

Gentle reader-a mad dog is a bugbear; we have walked many hundred times the diameter and the circumference of this our habitable globe-along all roads, public and privatewith stiles or turnpikes-metropolitan streets and suburban paths-and at all seasons of the revolving year and day; but never, as we padded the hoof along, met we nor were overtaken by greyhound, mastiff, or cur, in a state of hydrophobia. We have many million times seen them with their tongues lolling out about a yard-their sides panting-flag struckand the whole dog showing symptoms of severe distress. That such travellers were not mad we do not assert-they may have been mad-but they certainly were fatigued ;' and the difference, we hope, is often considerable between weariness and insanity. Dr Kitchiner, had he seen such dogs as we have seen, would have fainted on the spot. He would have raised the country against the harmless jog-trotter. Pitchforks would have gleamed in the setting sun, and the