y colony, and to make his sordid aureat or argent
bid therefor. Well do I remember how his nose, which he could not,
if his worthless life had depended upon it, render _retrousse_, grew
sublimely curvilinear in its contempt, as his hawk-eyes estimated my
pitiful family. I will not name the sum which he offered, the ghoul, the
vampire, the anthropophagous jackal, the sneaking would-be incendiary
of my little Alexandrian, the circumcised Goth! He left me, like
Churchill's Scotch lassie, "pleased, but hungry"; and I found, as
Valentine did in Congreve's "Love for Love," "a page doubled down in
Epictetus which was a feast for an emperor."

I own, my excellent Robert, that a bad book is, to my taste, sometimes
vastly more refreshing than a good one. I do not wonder that Crabbe,
after he had so sadly failed in his medical studies, should have
anathematized the medical writers in this fine passage:--

"Ye frigid tribe, on whom I waited long
The tedious hours, and ne'er indulged in song!
Ye first seducers of my easy heart,
Who promised knowledge ye could not impart!
Ye dull deluders, Truth's destructive foes!
Ye Sons of Fiction, clad in stupid prose!
Ye treacherous leaders, who, yourselves in doubt,
Light up false fires, and send us far about!--
Still may yon spider round your pages spin,
Subtle and slow, her emblematic gin!
Buried in dust and lost in silence dwell!
Most potent, grave, and reverend friends,--farewell!"

I acknowledge the vigor of these lines, which nobody could have written
who had not been compelled, in the sunny summer-days, to bray drugs in a
mortar. Yet who does not like to read a medical book?--to pore over its
jargon, to muddle himself into a hypo, and to imagine himself afflicted
with the dreadful disease with the long Latin name, the meaning of which
he does not by any means comprehend? And did not the poems of our friend
Bavius Blunderbore, Esq., which were of "a low and moderate sort," cause
you to giggle yourself wellnigh into an asphyxy,--calf and coxcomb as
he was? Is not ----'s last novel a better antidote against melancholy,
stupendously absurd as it is, than foalfoot or plantain, featherfew or
savin, agrimony or saxifrage, or any other herb in old Robert Burton's
pharmacopoeia? I am afraid that we are a little wanting in gratitude,
when we shake our sides at the flaying of Marsyas by some Quarterly of
Apollo,--to the dis-cuticlcd, I mean. If he had not piped so strid