apparelled footmen, who was now metamorphosed back to his original state of cad, arrayed in a complete suit of fustian, made his appearance; "take Mr. Soofoolish up to his room, undress him, and place him in his bed, and until morning don't allow him to leave his room." Into bed Soofoolysh was thrown, which said bed-according to our hero's account next morning-was constantly running from under him; and when, after some considerable difficulty, he did manage to make it stationary, it would set off again pivotwise and circumgirate. Ah! little did Lady Ditchwassen, who was listening to the witicisms of Colonel Canteen, at Oakstead, think her darling child was lying half-undressed on his bed, in the last stage of inebriation. The morrow dawned. The extreme penalty of the law was to be carried into effect against our honourable friend "Sweetly, oh! sweetly, the morning breaks With roseate streaks, Like the first faint blush on a maiden's cheeks; As that which its course has now begun Up the dark stairs he walks-ah! that fatal block-the uplifted arm-the instrument of torture. He supplicates for "first fault." "What! for being intoxicated and insulting your tutor? No SIR." With dizzy brain he sunk on the block—. But here let us drop the curtain; the sequel is too well known to all Etonians, too easy to be guessed by our other readers. Poor Soofoolysh!-fagging began. Ah! how thou wast licked for burning thy master's toast, for spoiling his crumpet, for spilling his tea! then, when dismissed from thy servitude, to find thine own tea medicinally prepared by some clever wag, or thy pictures broken, or thy bureau panelled. Unhappy youth. What! undergo the ratio ultima again? True-too true. It used to be the fashion, in the days when our hero was at Eton, for the sixth form boys to partake of their malt and cheese in their own rooms, and the lower boys were dispatched about every "after two" to smuggle in these forbidden fruits; and, to facilitate them in their peccadiloes, they usually carried a pair of Wellington boots, as if bringing them from the shoemaker's, into the legs of which a bottle or two of porter was easily concealed. Mr. Jones, knowing full well Wellington boots were prohibited within the walls of the college, began-to speak in familiar terms, perhaps hardly admissible here" to smell a rat;" so one day, rushing out of his study, he pounced on our hero, and found concealed in the legs of the boots the forbidden liquor. Unlucky fellow for there is but one punishment for this crimeflogging! Ah, poor fellow! Often and often wast thou sent to the bookseller's for the "History of Adam's Grandfather," to the fruiterer's for warm water ices, or to the irascible red-haired barber for a penny-worth of carrot-seed. (To be continued). L In the preceding chapter the reader read-if he took the trouble to peruse it-how a philosopher of the free and easy school set himself down to prove that the dregs of society, the scum of the devil's cauldron, as people are accustomed to consider them, are, in fact, the pink of morality. The case was certainly an extreme one; and forasmuch as it was a dashing essay, it was treated with observance. When "vaulting ambition o'erleaps itself, and falls on the other side," one is sorry if it sprain an ancle or strain a tendon; but should a caitiff, who ascends to his saddle by means of a horse-block, slip over and break his neck, he moves little compassion. The author took his legion of "legs," alive and reeking with abomination, and clapping it into the strongest relief he could command, called upon the world to behold his galaxy of excellence. This was going out of the way to find a forlorn hope, and volunteering to lead the storming party. Had his "legs" been defunct, it would have altered the affair entirely. Charity, they say, covereth a multitude of sins; death, which levels all distinctions, not only puts crime out of sight, but ushers vice and virtue cheek by jowl to posterity. Death is a patent of every cardinal virtue. If it were possible for the devil himself to breathe his last (the more's the pity that he can't), those who read his epitaph would most probably believe he was a brother of the man of Ross. No one is canonized till after death: once under ground, saint and sinner have equal main and chance. If the reader be no classic, he has been at all events to the Italian Opera; and what are his impressions of Queen Semiramis? Not the most exalted, certainly, in reference to her majesty's moralities. Yet a modern princess hath published a volume, and inscribed it to the present sovereign of these realms, wherein she protests that her royal sister of the Assyrian dynasty was a paragon of virtue. This is a bold stroke; but the champion fights through an embrasure of some three thousand years. The Quixote of the ring stands forward alone, and, armed in complete brass, tilts with facts as unceremoniously as an American member of Congress. Even let it pass, what more does he than anticipate the future? If we borrow our premises from present experience, are we not borne out in saying that the third or fourth generation of his contemporaries, when classing the worthies of his time, shall place Leatherlungs the Leg a little lower than Sir Robert Peel as a politician, and running a dead heat for morals with the Archbishop of Canterbury, especially if he leave handsome assets behind him? Who is in a condition to identify the godlike hand that created the living frize of the Parthenon? and is there a boardingschool miss who cannot tell you the architect of the great pyramid? Quocirca vivite fortes; therefore, never strain at a gnat, but boldly swallow the camel. Put money in your purse; and if you miss the minute, you're sure of posterity. But let us see whether the chance of present preferment be so remote a contingency for those who play no squeamish game-" for whom," saith Shakspeare "is the world made withal ?" Reader, hast thou a grandmamma in the flesh, or a maiden aunt of the quick, or any ancient gentlewoman of thy birth or kin in the land of the living? An thou hast, has she not talked to thee (what time thou didst listen, in grim hope of a loan for thy stern necessities) of anthropophagi-men who lie in wait for careless youth, and seek for minors whom they may devonr? Gamblers these are called among mortals: false dicers, sauter la coupe-ists, legs-a weak invention! Do you believe in ghosts?-do you put credit in goblins? -have you any faith in fairies?-any leaning whatever towards supernaturals, except for the Wilis in Giselle? People are too fond of raising spirits to make a sensation, as the witches are put on the scene in Macbeth. Satan is not always the gentleman in black that he is painted. Leatherlungs, with all his household gods around him, is a better fellow than many a beneficed clergyman with a sinecure of a thousand a year. We'll introduce you to him presently in his domestic capacity; but, in the first instance, we must dispose of the bugbear menagerie. We hope the reader is long since satisfied this history hath its moral; that it was begun, is continued, and will be ended to manifest some high and interesting truth-to "hold the mirror up to nature," rather than to help Smellfungus to a pair of green and yellow spectacles. Who is the philosopher of good-the misanthropist or the philanthropist? One would blush to be found affording shelter to such an inquiry. The milk of human kindness is charity, as developed in the physical man. It has been urged against Mr. Charles Dickins that he has collected the society of his novels from the highways; and against Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, that he has selected the heroes of his romances from the highwaymen. Have the critics forgotten that noble aphorism: "Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni?" When our publisher besought us to pen a work adapted for the general reader, through these pages, our first business-like Byron when he commenced his great epic-was to look about for a hero. With the foregoing hexameter as a guide, we should have picked out Lucifer, had not a distinguished French philosopher anticipated us. In that dilemma we naturally fell upon our present subject. The moment the idea seized our imagination, we were delighted with it. "Bating the devil," we mused, "there's nothing in or out of nature so unpopular as a 'leg,' unless indeed it be a mad dog. Should we indite a story of sentimental rabies? alas! a greater hand than ours had already immortalized the hydrophobia. He shall introduce himself and his essay to the reader, partly because of its intrinsic merit, and partly as an authority for the future method of our "morality." "Beware of dogs..... We cannot credit the very sweeping assertion, that multitudes of men, women, and children have died in consequence of being bitten by mad dogs. Even the newspapers do not run up the amount beyond a dozen per annum, from which you may safely deduct two-thirds. Now four men, women, and children are not a multitude. Of those four we may set down two as problematical-having died, it is true, in but not of hydrophobia; states of mind and body wide as the poles asunder. He who drinks two bottles of pure spirit every day he buttons and unbuttons his breeches, generally dies in a state of hydrophobia; for he abhorred water, and knew instinctively the jug containing that insipid element. But he never dies at all of hydrophobia, there being evidence to prove that for twenty years he had drunk nothing but brandy. Suppose we are driven to confess the other two. Why one of them was an old woman of eighty, who was dying as fast as she could hobble, at the very time she thought herself bitten; and the other, a nine-year-old brat in the hooping-cough and measles, who, had there not been such a quadruped as a dog created, would have worried itself to death before evening, so lamentably had its education been neglected, and so dangerous an accomplishment is an impish temper. The twelve cases for the year of the most horrible disease, hydrophobia, have, we flatter ourselves, been satisfactorily disposed of-eight of the alleged deceased being at this moment engaged at various handicrafts, on low wages indeed, but still such as enable the industrious to live; two having died of drinking, one of extreme old age, and one of a complication of complaints incident to childhood, their violence having, in this particular instance, been aggravated by neglect and a devilish temper. Where now the multitude of men, women, and children who have died in consequence of having been bitten by mad dogs? "Gentle reader, a mad dog is a bugbear. We have walked many hundred times the diameter and the circumference of this our habitable globe,along all roads-public and private-with stiles or turnpikes, metropolitan streets and suburban paths, and at all seasons of the revolving year and day; but never, as we padded the hoof along, met we, or were overtaken by, greyhound, mastiff, or cur in a state of hydrophobia. We have many millions of times seen them with their tongues lolling out about a yard, their sides panting, flag-struck, and the whole dog showing symptoms of severe distress. That such travellers were not mad we do not assert; they may have been mad, but they certainly were fatigued. Dr. Kitchener, had he seen such dogs as we have seen, would have fainted on the spot; he would have raised the country against the harmless jog-trotter. Pitchforks would have gleaned in the setting sun, and the flower of the agricultural youth of a midland county forming a heavy, en masse, would have offered battle to a turnspit. "The life of the most humble human being,' saith Dr. Kitchener, 'is of more value than all the dogs in the world. Dare the most brutal Cynic say otherwise?' This question is not put to us, for so far from being the most brutal Cynic, we do not belong to the Cynic school at all, being an Eclectic, and our philosophy composed chiefly of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Peripateticism, with a fine, pure, clear, bold dash of Platonicism. The most brutal Cynic, if now alive and snarling, must therefore answer for himself; while we tell the Doctor that, so far from holding with him that the life of the most humble human being is of more value than all the dogs in the world, we, on the contrary, verily believe that there is many a humble dog whose life far transcends in value the lives of many men, women, and children. Whether or not such dogs have souls, is a question in philosophy never yet solved; although we have ourselves no doubt on the subject, and firmly believe that they have souls. But the question, as put by the Doctor, is not about souls, but about lives; and as the human soul does not die when the human body does, the death of an old woman, middle-aged man, or young child is no such very great calamity either to themselves or to the world. Better, perhaps, that all the dogs now alive should be massacred to prevent hydrophobia, than that a human soul should be lost! But, not a human soul is going to be lost, although the whole canine species should become insane to-morrow. Now, would the Doctor have laid one hand on his heart and another on his bible, and taken a solemn oath that, rather than that one old woman of a century-and-a-quarter should suddenly be cut off by the bite of a mad dog, he would have signed the warrant of execution of all the packs of harriers and foxhounds, all the pointers and setters and cockers, all the staghounds, greyhounds, and lurchers; all the Newfoundlanders, shepherd's dogs, mastiffs, bull-dogs, terriers, the infinite generation of mongrels and crosses included, in Great Britain and Ireland, to say nothing of the sledge-drawers in Kamschatka and in the realms slow-moving near the Pole? To clench the argument at once: what are all the old women in Europe, one-half of the men, and one-third of the children, when compared in value with any one of Christopher North's (or Craven's) Newfoundland dogs, FroBronte, or O'Bronte? Finally, does he include in his sweeping condemnation the whole brute creation; lions, tigers, panthers, ounces, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, camelopards, zebras, quaggas, cattle, horses, asses, mules, cats, the ichneumon, cranes, storks, cocksof-the-wood, geese, and how-towdies? 6 "Semi-drowning in the sea,' he continues, and all the pretended specifics, are mere delusions; there is no real remedy but cutting the part out immediately. If the bite be near a blood-vessel, that cannot always be done; nor when done, however well done, will it always |