the work, as his principal incentive. Oh! that any muse
should be set upon a high stool to cast up accounts and balance a
ledger! Yet so it is; and the popular author finds it convenient to
fill up the declared deficit, and place himself in a position the
more effectually to encounter those liabilities which sternly assert
themselves contemporaneously and in contrast with the careless and
free-handed tendencies of the season by the emission of Christmas
books--a kind of literary assignats, representing to the emitter
expunged debts, to the receiver an investment of enigmatical value. For
the most part bearing the stamp of their origin in the vacuity of
the writer's exchequer rather than in the fulness of his genius, they
suggest by their feeble flavor the rinsings of a void brain after the
more important concoctions of the expired year. Indeed, we should as
little think of taking these compositions as examples of the merits of
their authors as we should think of measuring the valuable services of
Mr. Walker, the postman, or Mr. Bell, the dust-collector, by the copy of
verses they leave at our doors as a provocative of the expected annual
gratuity--effusions with which they may fairly be classed for their
intrinsic worth no less than their ultimate purport.

"In the Christmas book presently under notice, the author appears (under
the thin disguise of Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh) in 'propria persona'
as the popular author, the contributor to Punch, the remorseless pursuer
of unconscious vulgarity and feeble-mindedness, launched upon a tour
of relaxation to the Rhine. But though exercising, as is the wont of
popular authors in their moments of leisure, a plentiful reserve of
those higher qualities to which they are indebted for their fame, his
professional instincts are not altogether in abeyance. From the moment
his eye lights upon a luckless family group embarked on the same steamer
with himself, the sight of his accustomed quarry--vulgarity, imbecility,
and affectation--reanimates his relaxed sinews, and, playfully fastening
his satiric fangs upon the familiar prey, he dallies with it in mimic
ferocity like a satiated mouser.

"Though faintly and carelessly indicated, the characters are those
with which the author loves to surround himself. A tuft-hunting county
baronet's widow, an inane captain of dragoons, a graceless young
baronet, a lady with groundless pretensions to feeble health and poesy,
an obsequious nonentit