putrid disorders: Hoffman furnished instances of obstinate disorders cured by them, even consumptions; and Linnæus says that by eating plentifully of them, he kept himself free from the gout. They are good even for the teeth. A fruit so very useful and delightful deserves a better name; though the old one is now so identified with its beauty, that it would be a pity to get rid of it. Nobody thinks of straw, when uttering the word strawberry, but only of colour, fragrance and sweetness. The Italian name is Fragola,-fragrant. The English one originated in the custom of putting straw between the fruit and the ground, to keep it dry and clean; or perhaps, as Mr. Phillips thinks, from a still older practice among children, of threading the wild berries upon straws of grass. He says, that this is still a custom in parts of England where they abound, and that so many straws of berries" are sold for a penny. One of the most luxurious of simple dishes is strawberries and cream. The very sound of the words seems to set one's page floating like a bowl. But there is an Italian poet, who has written a whole poem upon strawberries, and who, with all his love of them, will not hear of them without sugar. He invokes them before him in all their beauty, which he acknowledges with enthusiasm, and then tells them, like some capricious sultan, that he does not choose to see their faces. They must hide them, he says:put on their veils,-to wit, of sugar. 66 Strawberries and sugar" are to him what "sack and sugar" was to Falstaff, the indispensable companions, the sovereign remedy for all evil-the climax of good. He finds fault with Molière's Imaginary sick Man" for not hating them; since, if he had eaten them, they would have cured his hypochondria. As to himself, he talks of them as Fontenelle would have talked, had he written Italian verse : Io per me d'esse, a boccon ricchi e doppi E di Fragole un' avida satolla Mi purga il sangue, e avviva ogni midolla, For my part, I confess I fairly swill And stuff myself with strawberries: and abuse The doctors all the while, draught, powder, and pill, And wonder how any sane head can choose To have their nauseous jalaps, and their bill, All which, like so much poison, I refuse. Give me a glut of strawberries: and lo! Sweet through my blood, and very bones, they go. Almost all the writers of Italy who have been worth anything, have been writers of verse at one time or another.-Prose-writers, historians, philosophers, doctors of law and medicine, clergymen, all have contributed their quota to the sweet art. The poet of the strawberries was a Jesuit, a very honest man too, notwithstanding the odium upon his order's tr name, and a grave, eloquent, and truly christian theologian, of a life recorded as evangelical." It is delightful to see what playfulness such a man thought not inconsistent with the most sacred aspirations. The strawberry to him had its merits in the creation, as well as the star; and he knew how to give each its due. Nay, he runs the joke down, like a humourist who could do nothing else but joke if he pleased, but gracefully withal, and with a sense of Nature above his Art, like a true lover of poetry. His poem is in two cantos, and contains upwards of nine hundred lines, ending in the following bridal climax, which the good Jesuit seems to have considered the highest one possible, and the very cream even of strawberries and sugar. He has been apostrophising two young friends of his, newly married, of the celebrated Venetian families Mocenigo and Loredano, and this is the blessing with which he concludes, pleasantly smiling at the end of his gravity : A questa coppia la serena pace E la ridente sanità vivace La sua vita longhissima consoli; E la felicità pura e verace, Non dal suo fianco un solo di s' involi; E a dire che ogni cosa lieta vada, Around this loving pair may joy serene XX. THE WAITER. GOING into the City the other day upon business, we took a chop at a tavern, and renewed our acquaintance, after years of interruption, with that swift and untiring personage, yclept a waiter. We mention this long interval of acquaintance, in order to account for any deficiencies that may be found in our description of him. Our readers perhaps will favour us with a better. He is a character before the public thousands are acquainted with him, and can fill up the outline. But we felt irresistibly impelled to sketch him; like a portraitpainter who comes suddenly upon an old friend, or upon an old servant of the family. We speak of the waiter properly and generally so called, the representative of the whole, real, official race, and not of the humourist or other eccentric genius occasionally to be found in it,-moving out of the orbit of tranquil but fiery waiting,-not absorbed, not devout towards us, not silent or monosyllabical;— fellows that affect a character beyond that of waiter, and get spoiled in club-rooms, and places of theatrical resort. "Thomas!" "Is my steak coming?" "And the pint of port?" "You'll not forget the postman ?" For in the habit of his acquiescence Thomas Your thorough waiter has no ideas out of the sphere of his duty and the business; and yet he is not narrow-minded either. He sees too much variety of character for that, and has to exercise too much consideration for the "drunken gentleman." But his world is the tavern, and all mankind but its visitors. His female sex are the maid-servants and his young mistress, or the widow. If he is ambitious, he aspires to marry one of the two latter: if other- His morning dress is a waistcoat or jacket; wise, and Molly is prudent, he does not know his coat is for afternoons. If the establishment but he may carry her off some day to be mistress is flourishing, he likes to get into black as he of the Golden Lion at Chinksford, where he will grows elderly; by which time also he is gene"show off" in the eyes of Betty Laxon who rally a little corpulent, and wears hair-powder, refused him. He has no feeling of noise itself dressing somewhat laxly about the waist, for but as the sound of dining, or of silence but as convenience of movement. Not however that a thing before dinner. Even a loaf with him he draws much upon that part of his body, is hardly a loaf; it is so many "breads." His except as a poise to what he carries; for you longest speech is the making out of a bill riva may observe that a waiter, in walking, uses only voce "Two beefs-one potatoes-three ales his lowest limbs, from his knees downwards. two wines-six and twopence"-which he does The movement of all the rest of him is negawith an indifferent celerity, amusing to new- tive, and modified solely by what he bears in comers who have been relishing their fare, and his hands. At this period he has a little money not considering it as a mere set of items. He in the funds, and his nieces look up to him. attributes all virtues to everybody, provided He still carries however a napkin under his they are civil and liberal; and of the existence arm, as well as a corkscrew in his pocket; nor, of some vices he has no notion. Gluttony, for for all his long habit, can he help feeling a instance, with him, is not only inconceivable, satisfaction at the noise he makes in drawing but looks very like a virtue. He sees in it a cork. He thinks that no man can do it only so many more "beefs," and a generous better; and that Mr. Smith, who understands scorn of the bill. As to wine, or almost any wine, is thinking so too, though he does not other liquor, it is out of your power to astonish take his eyes off the plate. In his right waisthim with the quantity you call for. His "Yes coat pocket is a snuff-box, with which he Sir" is as swift, indifferent, and official, at the supplies gentlemen late at night, after the fifth bottle as at the first. Reform and other shops are shut up, and when they are in despepublic events he looks upon purely as things rate want of another fillip to their sensations, in the newspaper, and the newspaper as a thing after the devil and toasted cheese. If particutaken in at taverns, for gentlemen to read. larly required, he will laugh at a joke, especially His own reading is confined to "Accidents at that time of night, justly thinking that genand Offences," and the advertisements for But- tlemen towards one in the morning "will be lers, which latter he peruses with an admiring facetious." He is of opinion it is in “human fear, not choosing to give up "a certainty."nature" to be a little fresh at that period, and When young, he was always in a hurry, and to want to be put into a coach. exasperated his mistress by running against the other waiters, and breaking the "neguses." As he gets older, he learns to unite swiftness with caution; declines wasting his breath in immediate answers to calls; and knows, with a slight turn of his face, and elevation of his voice, into what precise corner of the room to pitch his "Coming, Sir." If you told him that, in Shakspeare's time, waiters said "Anon, anon, Sir," he would be astonished at the repetition of the same word in one answer, and at the use of three words instead of two; and he would justly infer, that London could not have been so large, nor the chop-houses so busy, in those days. He would drop one of the two syllables of his "Yes, Sir," if he could; but business and civility will not allow it; and therefore he does what he can by running them together in the swift sufficiency of his "Yezzir." He announces his acquisition of property by a bunch of seals to his watch, and perhaps rings on his fingers; one of them a mourning ring left him by his late master, the other a present, either from his nieces' father, or from some ultra-good-natured old gentleman whom he helped into a coach one night, and who had no silver about him. To see him dine, somehow, hardly seems natural. And he appears to do it as if he had no right. You catch him at his dinner in a corner,-huddled apart,-"Thomas dining !" instead of helping dinner. One fancies that the stewed and hot meats and the constant smoke, ought to be too much for him, and that he should have neither appetite nor time for such a meal. Once a year (for he has few holidays) a couple of pedestrians meet him on a Sunday in the fields, and cannot conceive for the life of them who it is; till the startling recollection occurs-"Good God! It's the waiter at the Grogram!" XXI. "THE BUTCHER." BUTCHERS AND JURIES.—BUTLER'S DEFENCE OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA, &c. IT was observed by us the other day in a journal that "butchers are wisely forbidden to be upon juries; not because they are not as good as other men by nature, and often as truly kind; but because the habit of taking away the lives of sheep and oxen inures them to the sight of blood, and violence, and mortal pangs." The "Times," in noticing this passage, corrected our error. There neither is, nor ever was, it seems, a law forbidding butchers to be upon juries; though the reverse opinion has so prevailed among all classes, that Locke takes it for granted in his "Treatise on Education," and our own authority was the author of "Hudibras," a man of very exact and universal knowledge. The passage that was in our mind is in his "Posthumous Works," and is worth quoting on other accounts. He is speaking of those pedantic and would-be classical critics who judge the poets of one nation by those of another. Butler's resistance of their pretensions is the more honourable to him, inasmuch as the prejudices of his own education, and even the propensity of his genius, lay on the learned and anti-impulsive side. But his judgment was thorough-going and candid. The style is of the off-hand careless order, after the fashion of the old satires and epistles, though not so rough :— "An English poet should be tried by his peers, As butchers are forbid to be of a jury, To try their masters in a foreign tongue, * Tales (Latin) persons chosen to supply the place of men impannelled upon a jury or inquest, and not appearing when called. [We copy this from a very useful and pregnant volume, called the "Treasury of Knowledge," full of such heaps of information as are looked for in lists and vocabularies, and occupying the very margins with proverbs. Mr. Disraeli, sen., objects to this last overflow of contents, but not, we think, with his usual good sense and gratitude, as a lover of books. These proverbial sayings, which are the most universal things in the world, appear to us to have a particularly good effect in thus coming in to refresh one among the technicalities of knowledge.] Gave judgment on all past and future plays, And steal their far-fetch'd criticisms from him, Are charged by those who ten times worse commit, (How happily said!) When all their worst miscarriages delight And please more than the best that pedants write." Having been guilty of this involuntary scandal against the butchers, we would fain make them amends by saying nothing but good of them and their trade; and truly if we find the latter part of the proposition a little difficult, they themselves are for the most part a jovial, good-humoured race, and can afford the trade to be handled as sharply as their beef on the block. There is cut and come again in them. Your butcher breathes an atmosphere of good living. The beef mingles kindly with his animal nature. He grows fat with the best of it, perhaps with inhaling its very essence; and has no time to grow spare, theoretical, and hypochondriacal, like those whose more thinking stomachs drive them upon the apparently more innocent but less easy and analogous intercommunications of fruit and vegetables. For our parts, like all persons who think at all,-nay, like the butcher himself, when he catches himself in a strange fit of meditation, after some doctor perhaps has "kept him low," we confess to an abstract dislike of eating the sheep and lamb that we see in the meadow; albeit our concrete regard for mutton is considerable, particularly Welsh mutton. But Nature has a beautiful way of reconciling all necessities that are unmalignant; and as butchers at present must exist, and sheep and lambs would not exist at all in civilised countries, and crop the sweet grass so long, but for the brief pang at the end of it, he is as comfortable a fellow as can be,-one of the liveliest ministers of her mortal necessities, of the deaths by which she gives and diversifies life; and has no more notion of doing any harm in his vocation, than the lamb that swallows the lady-bird on the thyme. A very pretty insect is she, and has had a pretty time of it; a very calm, clear feeling, healthy, and, therefore, happy little woollen giant, com† Speroni, a celebrated critic in the days of Tasso. Filou-pickpocket! This irreverent epithet must have startled many of Butler's readers and brother-loyalists of the court of Charles the Second. But he suffered nothing to stand in the way of what seemed to him a just opinion. § Trover-an action for goods found and not delivered on demand.-Treasury of Knowledge. Butler's wit dragged every species of information into his net. pared with her, is the lamb,-her butcher; and an equally innocent and festive personage is the butcher himself, notwithstanding the popular fallacy about juries, and the salutary misgiving his beholders feel when they see him going to take the lamb out of the meadow, or entering the more tragical doors of the slaughterhouse. His thoughts, while knocking down the ox, are of skill and strength, and not of cruelty. And the death, though it may not be the very best of deaths, is, assuredly, none of the worst. Animals, that grow old in an artificial state, would have a hard time of it in a lingering decay. Their mode of life would not have prepared them for it. Their blood would not run lively enough to the last. We doubt even whether the John Bull of the herd, when about to be killed, would change places with a very gouty, irritable old gentleman; or be willing to endure a grievous being of his own sort, with legs answering to the gout; much less if Cow were to grow old with him, and plague him with endless lowings, occasioned by the loss of her beauty, and the increasing insipidity of the hay. A human being who can survive those ulterior vaccinations must indeed possess some great reliefs of his own, and deserve them, and life may reasonably be a wonderfully precious thing in his eyes; nor shall excuse be wanting to the vaccinators, and what made them such, especially if they will but grow a little more quiet and ruminating. But who would have the death of some old, groaning, aching, effeminate, frightened, lingerer in life, such as Mæcenas for example, compared with a good, jolly knockdown blow, at a reasonable period, whether of hatchet or of apoplexy, whether the bull's death or the butcher's? Our own preference, it is true, is for neither. We are for an excellent, healthy, happy life, of the very best sort; and a death to match it, going out calmly as a summer's evening. Our taste is not particular. But we are for the knock-down blow, rather than the death-in-life. The butcher, when young, is famous for his health, strength, and vivacity, and for his riding any kind of horse down any sort of hill, with a tray before him, the reins for a whip, and no hat on his head. It was a gallant of this sort that Robin Hood imitated, when he beguiled the poor Sheriff into the forest, and showed him his own deer to sell. The old ballads apostrophise him well as the “butcher so bold," or better-with the accent on the last syllable," thou bold butcher." No syllable of his was to be trifled with. The butcher keeps up his health in middle life, not only with the food that seems so congenial to flesh, but with rising early in the morning, and going to market with his own or his master's cart. When more sedentary, and very jovial and good-humoured, he is apt to expand into a most analogous state of fat and smoothness, with silken tones and a short breath,-harbingers, we fear, of asthma and gout; or the kindly apoplexy comes, and treats him as he treated the ox. When rising in the world, he is indefatigable on Saturday nights, walking about in the front of those white-clothed and joint-abounding open shops, while the meat is being half-cooked | beforehand with the gas-lights. The rapidity of his "What-d'ye-buy?" on these occasions is famous; and both he and the good housewives, distracted with the choice before them, pronounce the legs of veal "beautiful—exceedingly." How he endures the meat against his head, as he carries it about on a tray, or how we endure that he should do it, or how he can handle the joints as he does with that habitual indifference, or with what floods of hot water he contrives to purify himself of the exoterical part of his philosophy on going to bed, we cannot say; but take him all in all, he is a fine specimen of the triumph of the general over the particular. The only poet that was the son of a butcher (and the trade may be proud of him) is Akenside, who naturally resorted to the "Pleasures of Imagination." As to Wolsey, we can never quite picture him to ourselves apart from the shop. He had the cardinal butcher's-virtue of a love of good eating, as his picture shows; and he was foreman all his life to the butcher Henry the Eighth. We beg pardon of the trade for this application of their name: and exhort them to cut the cardinal, and stick to the poet. XXII. A PINCH OF SNUFF. WILL the reader take a pinch of snuff with us? Reader. With pleasure. Editor. How do you like it? Reader. Extremely fine? I never saw such snuff. Editor. Precisely so. It is of the sort they call Invisible—or as the French have it, tabac imaginaire-Imaginary snuff. No macuba equals it. The tonquin bean has a coarse flavour in comparison. To my thinking it has the hue of Titian's orange colour, and the very tip of the scent of sweet-brier. Reader. In fact, one may perceive in it just what one pleases, or nothing at all. Editor. Exactly that. Reader. Those who take no snuff whatever, or even hate it, may take this and be satisfied. Ladies, nay brides, may take it. Editor. You apprehend the delicacy of it to a nicety. You will allow, nevertheless, by virtue of the same fineness of perception, that even when you discern, or choose to discern, neither hue, scent nor substance in it, still there is a very sensible pleasure realised, the moment the pinch is offered. Reader. True, the good-will-that which is passing between us two now. Editor. You have it-that which loosens the tongues of people in omnibuses, and helps to thaw even the frozen-heartedness of diplomacy. Reader. I beg your pardon for a moment,but is thaw, my dear sir, the best word you could have chosen? Snuff can hardly be said to thaw. Editor. (Aside. This it is to set readers upon being critical, and help them to beat their teachers.) You are right-What shall we say? To dissipate-to scatter-to make evaporate? To blow up in a sneeze? Reader. I will leave you to judge of that. Editor. (Aside. His politeness is equal to his criticism. Oh, penny, two-penny, and threehalfpenny "trash!" You will end in ruining the trade of your inventors!) My dear reader, I wish I could give you snuff made of the finest Brazil, in a box of diamond. But goodwill is the flower of all snuff-taking; and luckily a pinch of that may be taken equally as well out of horn, or of invisible wood, as of the gifts of emperors. This is the point I was going to speak of. The virtues of snuff itself may be doubted; but the benevolence of an offered pinch and the gratitude of an accepted one, are such good things, and snuff-takers have so many occasions of interchanging these, that it is a question whether the harm of the self-indulgence (if any) is not to be allowed for the sake of the social benefit. A grave question! Let us consider it a little, with the seriousness becoming snuff-takers, real or imaginary. They are a reflecting race; no men know better that everything is not a trifle which appears to be such in uncleared eyes; any more than everything is grand which is of serious aspect or dimensions. A snufftaker looks up at some mighty error, takes his pinch, and shakes the imposture, like the remnant of the pinch, to atoms, with one "fleshquake" of head, thumb, and indifference. He also looks into some little nicety of question or of creation,-of the intellectual or visible world, and, having sharpened his eyesight with another pinch, and put his brain into proper cephalick condition, discerns it, as it were, microscopically, and pronounces that there is " more in it than the un-snuff-taking would suppose." We agree with him. The mere fancy of a pinch of snuff, at this moment, enables us to look upon divers worlds of mistake in the history of man but as so many bubbles, breaking, or about to break; while the pipe out of which they were blown, assumes all its real superiority in the hands of the grown smoker, the superiority of peace and quiet over war and childish dispute. An atom of good-will is worth an emperor's snuff-box. We happened once to be compelled to moot a point of no very friendly sort with a stranger whom we never saw before, of whom we knew nothing, and whose appearance in the matter we conceived to be altogether unwarrantable. At one of the delicatest of all conjunctures in the question, and when he presented himself in his most equivocal light, what should he do, but with the best air in the world take out a snuff-box, and offer us the philanthropy of a pinch? We accepted it with as grave a face as it was offered; but, secretly, the appeal was irresistible. It was as much as to say-"Questions may be mooted-doubts of all sorts entertained-people are thrown into strange situations in this world-but abstractedly, what is anything worth compared with a quiet moment, and a resolution to make the best of a perplexity?" Ever afterwards, whenever the thought of this dispute came into our recollection, the bland idea of the snuff-box always closed our account with it; and our goodwill survived, though our perplexity remained also. But this is only a small instance of what must have occurred thousands of times in matters of dispute. Many a fierce impulse of hostility must have been allayed by no greater a movement. Many a one has been caused by less! A few years ago, a petition was presented to the House of Commons on the subject of duelling; by which it appeared, that people have challenged and killed one another for words about "geese" and "anchovies," and "a glass of wine." Nay, one person was compelled to fight about our very peace-maker, "a pinch of snuff." But if so small are the causes of deadly offence, how often must they not have been removed by the judicious intervention of the pinch itself? The geese, anchovies, glass of wine and all, might possibly have been made harmless by a dozen grains of Havannah. The handful of dust with which the Latin poet settles his wars of the bees, was the type of the pacifying magic of the snuffbox: Hi motus animorum, atque hæc certamina tanta, These movements of high minds, these mortal foes, Yet snuff-taking is an odd custom. If we came suddenly upon it in a foreign country, it would make us split our sides with laughter. A grave gentleman takes a little casket out of his pocket, puts a finger and thumb in, brings away a pinch of a sort of powder, and then, with the most serious air possible, as if he was doing one of the most important actions of his life (for even with the most indifferent snufftakers there is a certain look of importance), proceeds to thrust, and keep thrusting it, at his nose! after which he shakes his head, or F |