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.]

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

he had been puzzling for a rhyme, and approached with the pen still in his hand: Bacchus was disturbed at his fifteenth tumbler, and resigned the whisky-bottle with a sigh. The ladies, too, drew near in a state of great agitation: Venus came first, wondering what could have put her father into such a rage, and hiding a billet-doux she had received from Mars. That gallant deity also just approached, dressed like a captain in the yeomanry; and while all the rest stood in silence, wondering at Jupiter's exclamations, he looked as bold as a bully after a beating, and said, "How now, governor! what's the meaning of all this? what mare's-nest have you discovered now?" Jupiter, who, by the by, very needlessly, as I thought, held a flaming thunderbolt in his hand, though it was now the height of summer, frowned upon his impertinent questioner, and said, "Hold your tongue, you babbling Bobadil, or I'll crack your skull with this thunderbolt: send little