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eil of the safe, softened to his eye, yet still solider than beef of the imagination. In truth, a man has much to overcome in preparing food for the mind, in the very thick of food for the body;--for a good authority (no less a man than Mr. Bayes) has strenuously advised that the belly should be empty when the brain is to be unloaded. How can a gentleman's gentleman, with a _corpus_ that banishes his backbone nearly four feet from the table at which he sits, betake himself to his cogitations over a tankard of October, and expect to beat your true thin garret-haunting devil, with an inside like a pea-shooter, who can scarcely be said to be one remove from the ethereal, and who writes from that best of inspirations--an empty pantry? We shall presently see whether an author from below is better than one from above--whether it will be more eligible that the Muses should have several more stories to descend, when their nine ladyships are invoked so to do--and that the pen should be taken out of the scraggy hand of a gentleman in rags, and be placed in the plump gripe of a gentleman in tags. Before we proceed to give an account of the book before us, we must yet take leave to indulge in a few reflections on the effect of this mental explosion in the noddles of John and James and Richard, upon reviewers, publishers, and the world in general. This change of lodging in the author will turn many things topsy-turvy, and conjure the spirit out of much long-established facetiousness. Pictures of poets in garrets will soon not be understood; bathos will be at a premium! the bard will be known, not by the brownness of his beaver, but by the gold band that encircles it. The historian shall go about in black plush breeches; and the great inspired writers of the age "have a livery more guarded than their fellows." Authors shall soon be, indeed, even more easily known by their dress. How often, too, shall we see Mr. Murray or Mr. Colburn descending "with the nine" to the hireling scribe, who is correcting the press and locking up the tea-spoons, against his coming; or they may have occasionally to wait below, while their authors are _waiting_ above. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green (almost a batch of he-muses in themselves), will get a new cookery-book, _well done_, from a genuine cook,[5] who divides his time between the spit and the pen; and the firm need not, therefore, set Mrs. Rundell's temper upon the _simmer_, as they are said
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