of St. Clement's. Of this I was myself an ear-witness. 2. At Kenwyn, two dogs, one of which was the parson's, were fighting at the westend of the church; the parson, who was then reading the second lesson, rushed out of the pew, and went down and parted them, returned to his pew, and, doubtful where he had left off, asked the clerk, "Roger, where was I?" "Why down parting the dogs, maister," said Roger. 3. At Mevagizzey, when non-resident clergymen officiated, it was usual with the squire of the parish to invite them to dinner. Several years ago, a non-resident clergyman was requested to do duty in the church of Mevagizzey on a Sunday, when the Creed of St. Athanasius is directed to be read. Before he had begun the service, the parish-clerk asked him, whether he intended to read the Athanasian Creed that morning. Why?" said the clergyman. "Because if you do, no dinner for you at the squire's, at Penwarne." 4. A very short time since, parish-clerks used to read the first lesson. I once heard the St. Agnes clerk cry out, " At the mouth of the burning viery vurnis, Shadrac, Meshac, and Abednego, com voath and com hether." [Daniel, chap. iii.] The clerk of Lamorran, in giving out the Psalm, "Like a timorous bird to distant mountains fly," always said, "Like a tem- mersum burde, &c. &c." with a shake of the head, and a quavering of the voice, which could not but provoke risibility.* Custom OBSERVED BY THE LORD LIEUTENANTS OF IRELAND. On the great road from London to West Chester, we find, at the principal inns, the coats of arms of several lord lieutenants of Ireland, framed, and hung up in the best rooms. At the bottom of these armorial pictures (as I may call them) is a full display of all the titles of the party, together with the date of the year when each viceroyship commenced. I have often inquired the reason of this custom, but never could procure a satisfactory answer. I do not reprobate the idea of this relique of ancient dignity, as these heraldic monuments were doubtless intended to operate as public evidences of the passage of each lord Rev. Mr. Polwhele's Recollections, deputy to his delegated government. They now seem only to be preserved for the gratification of the vanity of the capital innkeepers, by showing to humble travellers that such and such lord lieutenants did them the honour to stop at their houses; and yet I will not say, but that for half-acrown handsomely offered to his excellency's gentleman, they might likewise become part of the furniture of every ale house in Dunstable. After fruitless inquiry, accident furnished me with the ground of this custom, which now only serves to excite a little transitory curiosity. Having occasion to look into sir Dudley Digge's "Complete Ambassador," published in 1654, I was obliged to the editor for a solution, who, in the preface, (signed A. H.,) speaking of the reserve of the English ambassadors, in not making public their negotiations, has this observation:-"We have hardly any notion of them but by their arms, which are hung up in inns where they passed." This paragraph at once accounts for the point before us, and is sufficient, at the same time, to show that the custom was anciently, and even in the seventeenth century, common to every ambassador, though it now only survives with those who go in the greater and more elevated line of royal representation to Ireland. SAMUEL PEGGE.* For the Table Book. THE BACHELOR'S PLAINT. Hark! the curfew, friend to night, *Curialia Miscellanea. Strength, relax'd, which, blithe of strain, But, alas! mine,-woe is me ! Is benumb'd by apathy; Is indifference' dull throne- May, 1827. W. T. M. BRUMMELLIANA. A great deal used to be said of Beau Nash and his witticisms; but certainly we never met with any thing of his which was at all equal to the oracular sentences of the gentleman who gives a name to this article. Of all the beaux that ever flourished-at least, of all that ever flourished on the same score-exemplary of waistcoat, and having authoritative boots from which there was no appeal-he appears to us to have been the only one who made a proper and perfect union of the coxcombical and ingenious. Other men may have been as scientific on the subject of bibs, in a draper-like point of view; and others may have said as good things, which had none of the colouring arising out of the consciousness of fashionable preeminence. Beau Fielding, we believe, stands on record as the handsomest of beaux. There is Beau Skeffington, now rather sir Lumley, who, under all his double-breasted coats and waistcoats, never had any other than a single-hearted soul; he is to be recorded as the most amiable of beaux; but Beau Brummell for your more than finished coxcomb. He could be grave enough, but he was any thing but a solemn coxcomb. He played with his own sceptre. It was found a grand thing to be able to be a consummate fop, and yet have the credit of being something greater; and he was both. Never was any thing more exquisitely conscious, yet indifferent; extravagant, yet judicious. His superiority in dress gave such importance to his genius, and his genius so divested of insipidity his superiority in dress, that the poet's hyperbole about the lady might be applied to his coat; and "You might almost say the body thought." It was a moot point which had the more tact, his gloves or his fingers' ends. He played the balls of wit and folly so rapidly about his head, that they lost their distinctions in one crowning and brilliant halo. Mr. Brummell, it is true, is no longer in favour as a settler of fashions. Why, it is not our business to inquire. But though it may be said of his waistcoat, like Troy, that it was, his wit is, and will remain; and here, for the first time, a few specimens of it are collected. If George Etheridge himself would not have acknowledged a brother in George Brummell, then are no two gloves of a colour. To begin with what is usually reckoned the prince of his good things. Mr. Brummell having fallen out of favour with an illustrious person, was of course to be cut, as the phrase is, when met in public. Riding one day with a friend, who happened to be otherwise regarded, and encountering the personage in question, who spoke to the friend without noticing Mr. Brummell, he affected the air of one who waits aloof while a stranger is present; and then, when the great man was moving off, said to his companion, loud enough for the other to hear, and placidly adjusting his bibs, "Eh! who is our fat friend?" Having taken it into his head, at one time, to eat no vegetables, and being asked by a lady if he had never eaten any in his life, he said, "Yes, madam, I once eat a pea." Being met limping in Bond-street, and asked what was the matter, he said he had hurt his leg, and "the worst of it was, it was his favourite leg." Somebody inquiring where he was going to dine next day, was told that he really did not know: they put me in my coach and take me somewhere." He pronounced of a fashionable tailor that he made a good coat, an exceedingly good coat, all but the collar: nobody could achieve a good collar but Jenkins. Having borrowed some money of a city beau, whom he patronised in return, he was one day asked to repay it ; upon which he thus complained to a friend: "Do you know what has happened?"-" No." 66 Why, do you know, there's that fellow, Tomkins, who lent me five hundred pounds, has had the face to ask me for it; and yet I had called the dog Tom,' and let myself dine with him." "You have a cold, Mr. Brummell," observed a sympathizing group. "Why do you know," said he, "that on the Brighton road, the other day, that infidel, Weston, (his valet,) put me into a room with a damp stranger." Being asked if he liked port, he said, with an air of difficult recollection, "Port? port?-Oh, port!-Oh, ay; what, the hot intoxicating liquor so much drank by the lower orders?" Going to a rout, where he had not been invited, or rather, perhaps, where the host wished to mortify him, and attempted it, he turned placidly round to him, and, with a happy mixture of indifference and surprise, asked him his name. "Johnson," was the answer. "Jauhnson," said Brummell, recollecting, and pretending to feel for a card; "Oh, the name, I remember, was Thaun-son (Thompson;) and Jauhn son and Thaunson, you know, Jauhnson and Thaunson, are really so much the same kind of thing!" A beggar petitioned him for charity, even if it was only a farthing."-" Fellow," said Mr. Brummell, softening the disdain of the appellation in the gentleness of his tone, "I don't know the coin." Having thought himself invited to somebody's country seat, and being given to understand, after one night's lodging, that he was in error, he told an unconscious friend in town who asked him what sort of a place it was, that it was an exceedingly good place for stopping one night in." 66 Speaking lightly of a man, and wishing to convey his maximum of contemptuous feeling about him, he said, “He is a fellow, now, that would send his plate up twice for soup." "A It was his opinion, that port, and not porter, should be taken with cheese. gentleman," said he, "never malts with his cheese, he always ports.” It being supposed that he once failed in a matrimonial speculation, somebody condoled with him; upon which he smiled, with an air of better knowledge on that point, and said, with a sort of indifferent feel of his neckcloth, "Why, sir, the truth is, I had great reluctance in cutting the connection; but what could I do? (Here he looked deploring and conclusive.) Sir, I discovered that the wretch positively ate cabbage." Upon receiving some affront from an illustrious personage, he said that it was "rather too good. By gad, I have half a mind to cut the young one, and bring old G-e into fashion." When he went visiting, he is reported to have taken with him an elaborate dressing apparatus, including a silver basin; "For," said he, "it is impossible to spit in clay." On being asked by a friend, during an unseasonable summer, if he had ever seen such a one? Yes," replied B. "last winter." 66 On a reference being made to him as to what sum would be sufficient to meet the annual expenditure for clothes, he said, "that with a moderate degree of prudence and economy, he thought it might be managed for eight hundred per annum." He told a friend that he was reforming his way of life, "For instance," said he, "I sup early; I take a-a-little lobster, an apricot puff, or so, and some burnt champaigne, about twelve; and my man gets me to bed by three." Literary Pocket Book. Friday, May, 1827.. I had appointed this morning with my friend W. for a visit to the gallery of paintings at Dulwich College; and he was to obtain from a printseller an admission ticket, and bring it with him. He came furnished with the ticket, but as the ticket provided that the public were not to be admitted on a Friday, our seeing the pic tures was out of the question. Neither of us, however, was in a humour to be disappointed of a holiday; we therefore set out in the direction we had intended. A coachman hailed us from the box of a Dulwich stage; we gave him an assenting nod, and mounted the roof; and after a brisk drive through Walworth and Camberwell, which are now no other way distinguishable from the metropolis, than by the irregular forms and sizes of the houses, and the bits of sickly grass and bottle-green poplars that further diversify them, we attained to VOL. I.-22. the sight of the first out-of-town looking trees and verdure on the ascent towards Hernehill. Here we began to feel "another air;" and during the calm drive down the hill into Dulwich-the prettiest of all the village entrances in the environs of London-we had glimpses, between the elms and sycamores, of pleasant lawns and blooming gardens, with bursts of the fine distances. The calm of the scene was heightened by the note of the cuckoo: it was no "note of fear" to us-we remembered our good wives surrounded by their families; they had greeted our departure with smiles, and hopes that the day would be pleasant, and that we should enjoy ourselves;-the mother and the children rejoiced in "father's holiday" as a day of happiness to them, because it would make him happier. Leaving Dulwich College on our right, with an useless regret, that, by our mistake as to the day, the picture-gallery was closed to us, we indulged in a passing remark on the discrepancies of the building-the hall and west wing of the Elizabethan age; the east wing in the Vanbrugh style; and the gallery differing from each. Alighting, just beyond, at the end of the old road, and crossing to the new one in the same line, we diligently perused an awful notice from the parochial authorities against offenders, and acquainted ourselves with the rewards for apprehending them. The board seemed to be a standing argument in behalf of reading and writing, in opposition to some of the respectable inhabitants of Dulwich, who consider ignorance the exclusive property of labourers and servants, which they cannot be deprived of without injury to their morals. Ascending the hill, and leaving on the left hand a large house, newly built by a rich timber-merchant, with young plantations that require years of growth before they can attain sufficient strength to defend the mansion from the winds, we reached the summit of the hill, and found a directionpost that pointed us to a choice of several roads. We strolled into one leading to Penge Common through enclosed woodlands. Our ears were charmed by throngs of sweet singing birds; we were in a cathedral of the feathered tribe's, where "every denomination" chanted rapturous praises and thanksgivings; the vergerrobins twittered as they accompanied us with their full sparkling eyes and bright liveried breasts. Chiefs of the choir, and highest in the heavens, Were soaring larks; and some had dared so far To reverence these creatures' loud Te Deum- A gate in the road was opened to us by a poor woman, who had seen our approach from her road-side dwelling; she had the care of collecting the toll from horsemen and carriage-drivers-we were foot-passengers, and credited our tailors for the civility. At a few yards beyond this turnpike we stopped to read a dictatorial intimation:"All trespassers on these woods will be prosecuted, and the constables have orders to take them into custody." I am not sure that there is a "physiognomy of hand-writing," but I am a believer in the physiognomy of style, and the features of this bespoke a Buonaparte of the hundred who had partaken of the carvings under an enclosure-act. No part was fenced off from the common road, and the land had been open to all till spoliation deprived the commoners of their ancient right, and annexed the common soil to a neighbouring domain, Whose it now is, by law, I know not, nor inquired. I look around, and cottages have disappeared, and there are villas instead; and the workhouses are enlarged, and, instead of labour, tread-mills are provided. According to a political economist of ancient times, "There is much food in the tillage of the poor;" and "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent." To whom of old was it said, "The spoil of the poor is in your houses?" We lingered on our way, and passed a bridge over the canal, towards a well-looking public-house, called “ the Old Crooked Billet." Before the door is, what is called, a "sign," which, according to modern usage, is a sign-post, with a sign-board without a sign, inscribed with the name of what the sign had been. Formerly this was a little ale-house, and to denote its use to the traveller, the landlord availed himself of one of the large old trees then before the door, and hung upon the lowest of its fine spreading branches not the "sign" of the billet, but a real "crooked billet:" this was the origin of "the Old Crooked Billet" on (what was) Penge Common. We had set out late and loitered, and after a brief reconnoitre entered the house in search of |