ment of all these, I repeat, the world lay in total ignorance.

I will venture to declare that not one educated man in fifty, nay, in five hundred, knew that these people dined better than the officers of a marching regiment. Wine, indeed! I like the notion! Beer, and of the very lightest, to wash down a muttonchop dinner, is the dietary I should propose for them.

Are they to dine better than the gentlemen who are styled Pensioners at our Universities? better than all the vicars, and half the beneficed clergy of England? How many half-pay soldiers and sailors dine in this fashion? How many of those who supply the admirable reading of our public journals live in this way?

No intelligent groom ever thought of giving beans to a mettlesome horse, or over-stimulating the beast that was already too fiery, For the selfsame reason I would say, Don't overfeed your Bagmen. They are troublesome enough as it is. All who travel by rail or river know they are the most bumptious of mankind. Water their grog rather than strengthen it for them; and now that they are asking the world how much they should drink, take the happy moment to tell them what they should eat also.

TWADDLING REMINISCENCES.

Books of gossip, reminiscences, and twaddle, are just now greatly in vogue, and I think bespeak a very low state of public taste. When such books were written with smartness, much knowledge of life, and bore upon them, besides, the impress of a strong individuality in the writer, their popularity was intelligible enough; but ours is not an age of Horace Walpoles, and the consequence is, we are deluged with little dreary diaries in which the most uninteresting people in the world record where, how, and with whom they lived, the only point being the personality, and the sole relief to the uniform dulness lying in the reader's conviction that if the perusal of such trash be dreary, the inditing of it ought to be drearier still.

First of all, the mass of these writers, stimulated by that selfsame vanity that has driven them into

print, are possessed with an intense desire to be personally favourites with their readers. They want you to think them high-minded, noble, generous creatures, with grand motives and high aspirations. They desire to make you believe it is no small privilege to be admitted to their society, surrounded as they are with the high and mighty personages that figure through their pages. They impress you with not only their acquirements and information, but with a profound respect for their social condition— the daily habits of their lives-their nice tastetheir admirable breeding.

In a word, they admit you to a circle of wits, beauties, men of genius, and men of power, all to see that they themselves are centres around which these celebrities are "doing orbit," so that you naturally feel abashed by the very thought of criticising or questioning any statement put forward by such mighty authority. What! shall I arraign the judgment of him who knew Metternich and Talleyrand? -who talked political ecstasies with Madame de Staël and cosmogonies with Humboldt?

It is thus these people present themselves always. From the high ground of intimacy with men of distinction they discourse to us small folk on Men and Women and Things in General, not at their own risk and peril, however not courageously saying, I think

this, I say that, I proclaim the other-but, under the shield of a great name, shooting forth some petty slander or small irony on a contemporary, as though "in our set," "we," 99.66 nous autres," had this estimate of him-such was our opinion, and you know who "we" were.

The first thing to bear in mind with respect to these Raconteurs and I am driven to a French word in spite of myself-is, that it may be assumed as a maxim that great men are never great with little "people." It is not the Duke of Wellington as he was that we see in Mr Raikes's book; it is Mr Raikes's conception of the Great Duke-a very different matter indeed! It is surely not enough that the portrait-painter should have a great subject, he should have also the power to understand it—to appreciate and to depict it.

Now, it may be confidently asserted, that of the men admitted to the real intimacy of the great, nothing is rarer than to find one who has the leisure, the taste, or the talent to be an author.

It does not belong to these people's lives to write books; or, if they do, are they books of gossip and small-talk? The men who make history have not any very high estimation of the men who write it. Indeed the very unfaithfulness with which passing incidents are treated inspires this contempt,

and suggests a low opinion of those who practise it.

Whenever, therefore, we find a page studded with illustrious names, flung out in all the careless ease of everyday acquaintanceship, and read, "I was with Her Royal Highness on that morning at breakfast when the news came," &c. &c.; or "walking one evening in the garden at St Cloud with the Duc d'Orleans, when we came to that little group representing," &c., we are cheated for the moment into a sense of expectancy-we say to ourselves, "Here is a prince about to open his heart to us; for once we are about to know what these men are by nature— how in the freedom of their frienships" and then we come upon a little twaddling remark or a small jest that might have been said by His Highness's valet. Very disappointing is all this: but there is worse-far worse, in the conceited self-complacency of the narrator, impressing upon us at every word what good fortune is ours to have met with him— what a happy turn of fate it was that led us into his company.

I suspect that a really good diary would be a very difficult literary performance, and one totally out of the reach of any but a very gifted individual: to record briefly, sharply, and yet clearly, passing incidents; to jot down the leading events of a life,