minated so-and-so, and ostensibly intended to swell the tide of
expansive emotion incident upon the inauguration of the new year." I can
hardly believe as much even now--so little do we know what we really are
after, until men of genius come and interpret.

And besides the ostensible intention, the reader will perceive that my
judge has discovered another latent motive, which I had "locked up in my
own breast." The sly rogue! (if we may so speak of the court.) There is
no keeping anything from him; and this truth, like the rest, has come
out, and is all over England by this time. Oh, that all England, which
has bought the judge's charge, would purchase the prisoner's plea in
mitigation! "Oh, that any muse should be set on a high stool," says the
bench, "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 by
the emission of Christmas books--a kind of assignats that bear the stamp
of their origin in the vacuity of the writer's exchequer." There is
a trope for you! You rascal, you wrote because you wanted money! His
lordship has found out what you were at, and that there is a deficit in
your till. But he goes on to say that we poor devils are to be pitied
in our necessity; and that these compositions are no more to be taken as
examples of our merits than the verses which the dustman leaves at his
lordship's door, "as a provocative of the expected annual gratuity,"
are to be considered as measuring his, the scavenger's, valuable
services--nevertheless the author's and the scavenger's "effusions
may fairly be classed, for their intrinsic worth, no less than their
ultimate purport."

Heaven bless his lordship on the bench--What a gentle manlike badinage
he has, and what a charming and playful wit always at hand! What a sense
he has for a simile, or what Mrs. Malaprop calls an odorous comparison,
and how gracefully he conducts it to "its ultimate purport." A gentleman
writing a poor little book is a scavenger asking for a Christmas-box!

As I try this small beer which has called down such a deal of thunder, I
can't help thinking that it is not Jove who has interfered (the case was
scarce worthy of his divine vindictiveness); but the Thunderer's man,
Jupiter Jeames, taking his master's place, adopting his manner, and
trying to dazzle and roar like his awful employer. That figure of the
dustman has hardly been flung from heaven: that "ultimate purp