days) could be assigned in favour of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in ROAST PIG.

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate -princeps obsoniorum.

Behold him, while he is doing-it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equally he twirleth round the string!-Now he is just done. To see the extréme sensibility of that tender age, he hath wept out his pretty eyes-radiant jellies -shooting stars—

See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth!-wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal-wal

lowing in all manner of filthy conversation—from these sins he is happily snatched away—

Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade,

Death came with timely care

his memory is odoriferous-no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon -no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking sausages --he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure-and for such a tomb might be content to die.

I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." Hares,

pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens

(those "tame villatic fowl"), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, "give every thing." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the giver of all good flavours, to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what) a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say to my individual palate-it argues an insensibility.

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild

and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet!

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students. when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, "Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to death?" I forget the decision.

[ESSAYS OF ELIA, BY CHARLES LAMB. B.]

THE HOUR OF FORTUNE,

IN THREE NICKS.

Jove

METHOUGHT 1 was present with Quevedo, when he paid one of his visits to Elysium. seemed to be in a most towering passion, and grumbled and growled amazingly; interlarding his discourse with sundry expletives not fit to be mentioned to ears polite.

Many of the immortals came running up to ascertain the cause of his indignation: Apollo, with a flaming crown upon his head, made of highly burnished brass, rose from a table where