ed his objurgations to the occasional follies or
shortcomings of mankind; while he ridiculed the energy of the squire
devoted to the slaughter of partridges, or the mistake of some noble
patron who turned a poet into a gauger of beer-barrels, it was all
well; we were glad to be told our faults and to look forward to the
coming millennium, when all men, having sufficiently studied the works
of Dr Anticant, would become truthful and energetic. But the doctor
mistook the signs of the times and the minds of men, instituted
himself censor of things in general, and began the great task of
reprobating everything and everybody, without further promise of any
millennium at all. This was not so well; and, to tell the truth, our
author did not succeed in his undertaking. His theories were all
beautiful, and the code of morals that he taught us certainly an
improvement on the practices of the age. We all of us could, and many
of us did, learn much from the doctor while he chose to remain vague,
mysterious, and cloudy: but when he became practical, the charm was
gone.

His allusion to the poet and the partridges was received very well.
"Oh, my poor brother," said he, "slaughtered partridges a score of
brace to each gun, and poets gauging ale-barrels, with sixty pounds a
year, at Dumfries, are not the signs of a great era!--perhaps of the
smallest possible era yet written of. Whatever economies we pursue,
political or other, let us see at once that this is the maddest of the
uneconomic: partridges killed by our land magnates at, shall we say,
a guinea a head, to be retailed in Leadenhall at one shilling and
ninepence, with one poacher in limbo for every fifty birds! our poet,
maker, creator, gauging ale, and that badly, with no leisure for
making or creating, only a little leisure for drinking, and such like
beer-barrel avocations! Truly, a cutting of blocks with fine razors
while we scrape our chins so uncomfortably with rusty knives! Oh, my
political economist, master of supply and demand, division of labour
and high pressure--oh, my loud-speaking friend, tell me, if so much
be in you, what is the demand for poets in these kingdoms of Queen
Victoria, and what the vouchsafed supply?"

This was all very well: this gave us some hope. We might do better
with our next poet, when we got one; and though the partridges might
not be abandoned, something could perhaps be done as to the poachers.
We were unwilling, however, to take