"murdering" her darling sister's son, a full cousin, thirty-three times removed, of Sir Orson Snake, Baronet, of Corkscrew Lodge, head and chief of the real, ould, ancient, good-fordrinking-and-nothing-else Snakes of Galway. The warrant being, of course, refused, my aunt declared she would "skiver the heart" of Lady Harberton, for allowing her darling boy to be "thumped;" whereupon she was very properly bound over to keep the peace towards his Majesty's subjects, and to her ladyship in particular, and I was graciously permitted to return to my primitive education of blackguarding about the streets and bobbing for eels.

At these pursuits I might have continued long enough, had not a charitable neighbour of ours promised me threepence a week while I went regularly to the Model School of the Kildare Place Society. Here I actually learned to read, and to perform a series of eccentric evolutions with the tip of my fore-finger, in a platter of sand, which I was led to imagine nothing less than signing my own name. also came to understand that the world had two halves, and four quarters, and indeed, to this very day, I cannot well imagine how the world could, by any possibility, have more or less.

All this, and very little more, I was bribed to attain by the stimulus of threepence per week; for, although I hated learning as a National schoolmaster hates the gospel, I had sense enough to know that threepence a week was an income not to be sneezed at. Of course I kept the threepence a-week a profound secret from my aunt, but that did not save me from the mischievous exercise of the unhappy creature's folly and absurdity. Some goodnatured friend had told her that pauper children were received at the Kildare Place Model School, and educated in the same classes as her sister's son, a scion of the noble Snakes of Galway. My aunt's blood was up in a twinkling. She wondered who had dared to induce her sister's son to " demean him. self in a school with ragamuffins," and informed me that if I put my foot over the threshold of a school where "beggars' brats" were permitted to enter I need never darken her door. There was nothing for it but to give up my aunt, or give up the threepence a-week and the Model School. The latter

I did not care so materially about, but the loss of my little independence was a thing not to be thought of,-so sensibly does self-interest touch us at the earliest age,-threepence a-week was a halfpenny a-day, for every working-day. My aunt, to be sure, was-my aunt, and that was all; so, with small deliberation, to the devil I pitched my aunt, her second-rate lodgings in a third-rate street, her devotion, her dirt, her insufferable pride, and the Snakes of Galway!

With tears in my eyes, I lamented my hard fate to my benefactor-tears, which the good easy man attributed to the laudable emotion of a love of learning, acting upon an ingenuous and sensitive mind,-never dreaming that the probable loss of the six halfpence per week had opened the fountains of mine eyes on this occasion. Instead, however, of withdrawing his bounty, he advised me to try some profitable line of life, towards which he munificently presented me with a capital, in ready cash, of half-a-crown. After some time spent in consideration of the various avenues to fortune which might be opened by the magic of two and sixpence, I determined in favour of literature ;-I had thoughts of stay-tape, needles, pins, buttons, and buckram; but all gave way to my attachment to literature, not from any love for letters, but because letters were associated in my mind with the celestial music of six weekly "browns" harmoniously chiming in the left-hand pocket (for I am left-handed, like Colkitto) of my corduroy "smalls." Accordingly I embraced literature, the trade of great men, and began professional life as a newsman. If you have never been in Dublin you are not probably aware that the regular trade of a news-vender is there unknown,— subscribers to the various newspapers are furnished with their copies direct from the newspaper office, while casual readers depend upon peripatetic newsmongers who go about shouting the names of newspapers at the top of their lungs, from one end of the city to the other. These people are also accustomed to lend the various papers to those who require them for a short time, at the rate of one penny or twopence per paper, as may be agreed on, and in this way make a profit of from twopence to eighteenpence per diem. I was obliged to be up by peep

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of day to await the opening of the newspaper offices, for our hope of sale depended much on being early in the market; the morning coaches were next to be attended to, and canvassed for purchasers; then, if I had luck, I was accustomed to indulge in a "penny dog," a "crubeen," and a cropper, which, it may be proper to apprise the uninitiated, are terms translatable, respectively, by a penny roll, a boiled pig's trotter with the skin on, and a glass of raw whisky. When sales were dull, I contented myself with the "cropper" only, and thus you see how it is that poverty and drunkenness come to be so constantly associated.

If I had the good fortune to take breakfast, which always depended upon the humour of the passengers by the early morning coaches-it was now nine o'clock, at which hour I was expected to deliver the morning papers with my respective customers-running from house to house to receive and re-deliver my papers, standing a little while at the hall doors until the lazy servants tumbled up, in which interval, I improved my political information by a cursory glance at the leading article, occupied me until dinner time, when a bowl of beef broth with cabbage in it, and another "dog," served me for dinner, and then I was off like a shot to be first for the evening papers. When these were issued, my rounds recommenced, broken in upon only by attendance on the exit of the evening mails, and occasional abberrations into the punch-houses in search of "a cropper;" until midnight, when I received my last Evening Post, or Evening Mail, as the case might be, from the hands of the sleepy footman or worn-out waiting-maid, and slunk home, very often wet through and through with a long winter day rain, to balance my account on my ten fingers with the publishers of the Dublin newspapers, and strike a balance in my own favour, after a hard day's work, of-fivepence halfpenny.

I spare you a description of my three-pair back in Golden Lane, where I was accustomed to repose on "half a bed" for a bed, read strawmatrass with a counterpane flung over it), at ninepence sterling per week, because there was really nothing to describe. I have seen in print, to be sure, very picturesque and elaborate

descriptions of the habitations of unshaven highwaymen and juvenile pickpockets, but I have lived in places of this kind myself, and never saw any thing describable, although I can enumerate very many things that are not. The places were poor and not very clean, to be sure, but at ninepence a-week I saw no opportunity of doing better.

I hope I will not be construed into having any intention to disparage the Cockney school of prose by these observations. The Newgate Calen dar, and the Lives of Eminent Housebreakers and Highwaymen, I take to be historical works of a very high order, of an undoubted accuracy and research in matters of fact, great probability and truth in the deduction of inferences, manly vigour of sentiment, and elegant terseness of expression. Even as to minor literary graces, I think it impossible for any refined and feeling mind to peruse the account of "Dorothy Hastie" in the Newgate Calendar, who smoked three pipes of tobacco, and imbibed two pots of half-andhalf, sitting up in her coffin, having been an hour before turned off at Tyburn, without confessing that in pathetic passages, that spirit-stirring work is no less great than in simple narrative and unexaggerated description.

But I am no less bound in candour (sitting for a moment in the critical chair) to confess, that when I see murdering pedagogues, who taught Hebrew and astronomy, and cut their neighbour's throats-hunted highwaymen, whose chief recommendation to the public seems to be their great capabilities for running away-sentimental house-breakers, talking platonics, and keeping mistresses, degraded from their natural and legitimate immortality in the Newgate Calendar, and got up, for the trade, in all the trumpery namby-pambyism of fashionable novels, faded dialogue, stale jokes, and melo-dramatic tricks, borrowed from the penny theatres and inserted by way of plot, I am not a little inclined to turn to the last few pages of the last volume in the hope of finding the sentimental author and his sentimental felon " turned off" in eternal enjoyment of each other's very delectable society. Of course, as I said before, I would not by any means

be understood as putting the era of Addison, Swift, and Steele, Smollet, Richardson, or Goldsmith, in competition with the exalted Cockney literature of our day, which, together with the Cockney school of architecture, inspires the awe-struck spectator, or reader, as the case may be, with mingled sentiments of exalted reverence and rapture—

"With my sentimentalibus pickpocket

orum,

And pathos and bathos delightful to seeWith my stucco and paint, â-la-mode Cockney-orum.

Sing hi diddle, ho-diddle, pop diddle dee."

I went on in the literary line of life for about three years and three quarters with fluctuating success. In the Parliamentary season, when trade was brisk, I eat always one, and occasionally two meals a-day, and kept my toes within their appropriate leathers. About Christmas and in the long vacation, I assure you solemnly, I was obliged occasionally to take to balladsinging, to raise a penny. I daresay you think this cursed low- and I agree with your worship-but business was slack, and times dull, and if it were not for the dreadful murders in Tipperary, which averaged in my time about five per week, and went off briskly at a halfpenny a-piece, may I never taste a drop of any thing stronger than my aunt's congo if I could have made the two ends meet.

During all this period I made great progress in the study of leading articles and the whole mechanism of newspaper manufacture, which it will be my duty to detail to you at more length in connexion with my distinguished career as sub-editor, foreign correspondent, and city intelligencer of the "Flare-up" Metropolitan Sunday paper, of which more in its proper place.

My old patron, to whose munificence I was indebted for the halfcrown with which I established myself as a "diffuser of useful knowledge," continued to be very kind to me on all occasions, and indeed I must have gone for a soldier many times if he had not now and then volunteered the loan of a sixpence.

On Christmas day, New-year's day, Easter Sunday, and Whit Monday, as sure as those long-expected festi

vals came round, my generous Mecænas gave me a dinner-not a dirty plateful of trimmings and potato skins, as if I had been co-equal with the pigs in a sty (the coin in which a great many pious alms-givers lend to the Lord), but the joint on which his own good-hearted family had regaled themselves, brought to a little back parlour by one of his rosy-cheeked daughters-may I never prosper in love if I have seen so fine a girl before or since with a black jack of sound beer, potatoes, and bread—as the beggarly Mounseers say, "à discretion." When I had tucked in a week's victuals, at the very least, the rosycheeked darling entered, bearing a full, hearty, honest tumbler of punch, with her father's compliments, hoping I had made a good dinner; whereupon it was my custom to drink healths a piece to you, miss, to your good father and mother, and all belonging to them, prefaced with what I observed the newspapers to call a "neat and appropriate speech."

To see what honours and dignities a man may arrive at in this free country! here you see me, the little newspaper boy-now a big boy-recording his various efforts in search of bread in a production as widely diffused as civilisation itself-admitted to the participation of MAGA, bound up in the same reverend wrapper (let me speak it exulting humbly), with the critic, the orator, philosopher, na. turalist, statesman, philanthropist, POET-with, in two imperishable words, CHRISTOPHER NORTH himself!

Let us have none of your Radical trash about aristocratic exclusionthe fashionable world, it is true, is exclusively aristocratic, and it oughtthree thorough-bred generations, at the least, are indispensable to the constitution of a visitor at Almack's; and sooner than let "faggot peers' or mushroom baronets quiver a metatarsal bone within those crimson cords that limit the gay confusion of the dance-strike me hideous-or, it is all the same-amputate my whiskers!

Political, legal, magisterial honours employments, civil and militaryevery man that can, even an oystereater, aye, or an oyster-seller, if he chooses to try, may win. Come on, then, my generous rivals in the pursuit of honourable fame-the contest is noble, and does equal honour to the

rals, or are they so far above his, that they can afford to laugh and be uncontaminated? I really fear we can afford to do no such thing with impunity. Good-humour and joviality are the masks the devil wears every day, and in which he is most successful, up to a certain point. There is a degree of villany, where the power of assuming those characters is impossible; and that is an awful state. But here the resources of the devil do not fail him he makes in fiction what cannot be in reality, sets up his wooden idol, unites the incompatibilities, mirth and utmost villany, and deteriorates human nature by an example beyond human nature. Such had been my reflections when I reached home; I threw myself into a chair, hoping that things were not quite so bad, and was willing to give up all my conclusion, when, without troubling my head further about the matter, I took up the newspaper of the day. I was first led to notice the Police Reports. I was struck with the coincidence in certain respects between them and the exhibition I had seen. The reporters had been each severally acting the peculiar parts of their proprietorship, and dressed up and pulled the strings of their puppets as they pleased, and put what words they liked into their mouths; or, verily, the manners of Punch and his proprietors had infected the whole community, and set off justices and culprits to enact buffooneries, before the scarcely sober world. I came to this case-and such are to be seen in every day's report: After many had been fined and punished for drunkenness and general disorderly conduct-some first offences, dull dogs who had nothing to say for themselves -a notorious offender is brought up; he has the gift, and in his peculiar way uses it; by a few quaint answers, gets the laugh on his side, and is let off, and with a burlesque virtuous admonition, that reads as if it were shortened to save magistracy from the downright indecency of a horse-laugh. We shall have HB. caricaturing Virtue "holding both her sides," and Justice dropping the scales, no longer able to stand upright, from indulging in risibility at seeing the broad farce of Humour enacted by Vice. Quit the reports, turn to the politics-there too is the stage set up, the puppets worked, their trickeries exhibited, and with buffoonery for argument, sober truth

is hissed off the stage; mumping mummery and braggadocio impudence are the favourite characters, allowed to do any thing, or do nothing, as long as they can amuse the people by pocketing their money with a jerk and a trick. I have been gravely told, that a good, lying, filthy, successful newspaper joke against the Tories, is as good to an editor as a treasury warrant for a thousand pounds. "What serious is we turn to farce." We are become the most humorous people, excepting in our caricatures-there our humour is very small, indeed, and our wit may run in a curricle with our humour, well matched ponies. Punch had a language of his own-it is said to be partly obsolete, and that some of our most ingenious and clever writers have been employed in enriching his vocabulary. For this, they have sought expressions suited to his practices; they have therefore dived into those dens of iniquity where they would be most likely to meet with them, and, it must be confessed, they have brought back an ample store: They have entered, too, into the very mystery and power of the jovial villain, and as they have learnt from him the value of covering ill deeds with odd gestures and funny names, it is very hard to know things by what they are called; and slang words, and, if the expression may be allowed, slang apparel, so pass off meretricious morality, that half the world take her for real virtue. Some, in other respects elegant writers, seeing the thing become a sort of fashion, have been bolder still, and not only brought back the language from those dens of iniquity, but have actually brought the characters themselves, and made them speak and act pretty much as they do, perhaps, in real life, occasionally for the purpose of making them more interesting, engrafting upon them the manners of what is called a higher society, and, that there may be a fair reciprocity, occasionally engrafting upon more polished characters the manners, the slang included, of scoundrels and pickpockets. Punch himself, therefore, to keep pace with the fashionable world who have taken to his walk, is obliged to undergo changes. It is to be hoped they will be for the better, but, it is to be feared, the examples set him lead to the worse. From this adoption in our modern novels and fashionable writings of every descrip