his neighbors as a swallower of loaches. Even in such practical whims and oddities I am deficient,—for instance, eschewing razors, or bolting clasp-knives, riding on painted ponies, sleeping for weeks, fasting for months, devouring raw tripe, and similar eccentricities, which have entitled sundry knaves, quacks, boobies, and brutes, to a brief biography in the Wonderful Magazine. And, in the absence of these distinctions, I am equally deficient in any spiritual pretensions. I have had none of those experiences which render the lives of saintlings, not yet in their teens, worth their own weight in paper and print, and consequently my personal history, as a Tract, would read as flat as the Pilgrim's Progress without the Giants, the Lions, and the grand single combat with the Devil.

To conclude, my life," upon my life,"-is not worth giving, or taking. The principal just suffices for me to live upon; and of course, would afford little interest to any one else. Besides, I have a bad memory; and a personal history would assuredly be but a middling one, of which I have forgotten the beginning and cannot foresee the end. I must, therefore, respectfully decline giving my life to the world—at least till I have done with it but to soften the refusal, I am willing, instead of a written character of myself, to set down all that I can recall of other authors, and, accordingly, the next number will contain the first instalment of

MY LITERARY REMINISCENCES.

LITERARY REMINISCENCES.

"Commençons par le commencement."

THE very earliest of one's literary recollections must be the acquisition of the alphabet; and in the knowledge of the first rudiments I was placed on a par with the Learned Pig, by two maiden ladies that were called Hogsflesh. The circumstance would be scarcely worth mentioning, but that being a dayboarder, and taking my dinner with the family, I became aware of a Baconian brother, who was never mentioned except by his Initial, and was probably the prototype of the sensitive “Mr. H.,” in Lamb's unfortunate farce. The school in question was situated in Token-house Yard, a convenient distance for a native of the Poultry, or Birchin-lane, I forget which, and in truth am not particularly anxious to be more certainly acquainted with my parish. It was a metropolitan one, however, which is recorded without the slightest repugnance; firstly, for that, practically, I had no choice in the matter; and secondly, because, theoretically, I would as lief have been a native of London as of Stoke Pogis or Little Pedlington. If such local prejudices be of any worth, the balance ought to be in favor of the capital. The Dragon of Bow Church, or Gresham's Grasshopper, is as good a terrestrial sign to be born under as the dunghill cock on a village steeple. Next to being a citizen of the world, it must be the best thing to be born a citizen of the world's greatest city. To a lover of his kind, it should be a welcome dispensation that cast his nativity amidst the greatest congregation of the species; but a literary man should exult rather than otherwise that he first saw the light-or perhaps the fog-in the same metropolis as Milton, Gray, De Foe, Pope, Byron, Lamb, and other townborn authors, whose fame has nevertheless triumphed over the

Bills of Mortality. In such a goodly company I cheerfully take up my livery; and especially as Cockneyism, properly so called, appears to be confined to no particular locality or station in life. Sir Walter Scott has given a splendid instance of it in an Orcadian, who prayed to the Lord to bless his own tiny ait, "not forgetting the neighboring island of Great Britain ;" and the most recent example of the style I have met with, was in the Memoirs of Sir William Knighton, being an account of sea perils and sufferings during a passage across the Irish Channel by "the First Gentleman in Europe."

Having alluded to my first steps on the ladder of learning, it may not be amiss in this place to correct an assertion of my biographer in the Book of Gems, who states, that my education was finished at a certain suburban academy. In this ignorant world, where we proverbially live and learn, we may indeed leave off school, but our education only terminates with life itself. But even in a more limited sense, instead of my education being finished, my own impression is, that it never so much as progressed towards so desirable a consummation at any such establishment, although much invaluable time was spent at some of those institutions where young gentlemen are literally boarded, lodged, and done for. My very first essay was at one of those places improperly called semi-naries, because they do not half teach anything; the principals being probably aware that the little boys are as often consigned to them to be "out of a mother's way," as for anything else. Accordingly, my memory presents but a very dim image of a pedagogical powdered head, amidst a more vivid group of females of a composite charter-part drynurse, part housemaid, and part governess, with a matronly figure in the back-ground, very like Mrs. S., allegorically representing, as Milton says, "our universal mother." But there is no glimpse of Minerva. Of those pleasant associations with early school days, of which so much has been said and sung, there is little amongst my retrospections, excepting, perhaps, some sports which, like charity, might have been enjoyed at home, without the drawbacks of sundry strokes, neither apoplectic nor paralytic, periodical physic, and other unwelcome extras. I am not sure whether an invincible repugnance to early rising

may not be attributable to our precocious wintry summonses, from a warm bed into a dim damp school-room, to play at filling our heads on an empty stomach; and perhaps I owe my decided sedentary habits to the disgust at our monotonous walks, or rather processions, or maybe to the sufferings of those longer excursions of big and little, where a pair of compasses had to pace as far and as fast as a pair of tongs. Nevertheless, I yet recall, with wonder, the occasional visits of grown-up ex-scholars to their old school, all in a flutter of gratitude and sensibility at recognizing the spot where they had been caned, and horsed, and flogged, and fagged, and brimstone-and-treacled, and blackdosed, and stick-jawed, and kibed, and fined,-where they had caught the measles and the mumps, and been overtasked, and undertaught and then, by way of climax, sentimentally offering a presentation snuff-box to their revered preceptor, with an inscription, ten to one, in dog Latin on the lid !

For my own part, were I to revisit such a haunt of my youth, it would give me the greatest pleasure, out of mere regard to the rising generation, to find Prospect House turned into a Floor Cloth Manufactory, and the playground converted to a bleachfield. The tabatière is out of the question. In the way of learning, I carried off nothing in exchange for my knife and fork, and spoon, but a prize for Latin without knowing the Latin for prize, and a belief which I had afterwards to unbelieve again, that a block of marble could be cut in two with a razor.

To be classical, as Ducrow would say, the Athenians, the day before the Festival of Theseus, their Founder, gratefully sacrificed a ram, in memory of Corridas the schoolmaster, who had been his instructor; but in the present day, were such offerings in fashion, how frequently would the appropriate animal be a donkey, and especially too big a donkey to get over the Pons Asinorum!

From the preparatory school, I was transplanted in due time to what is called by courtesy, a finishing one, where I was immediately set to begin everything again at the beginning. As this was but a backward way of coming forward, there seemed little chance of my ever becoming what Mrs. Malaprop calls " progeny of learning;" indeed my education was pursued very

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much after the plan laid down by that feminine authority. I had nothing to do with Hebrew, or Algebra, or Simony, or Fluxions, or Paradoxes, or such inflammatory branches; but I obtained a supercilious knowledge of accounts, with enough of geometry to make me acquainted with the contagious countries. Moreover, I became fluent enough in some unknown tongue to protect me from the French Mark; and I was sufficiently at home (during the vacations) in the quibbles of English grammar, to bore all my parents, relations, friends, and acquaintance, by a pedantical mending of their "cakeology." Such was the sum total of my acquirements; being, probably, quite as much as I should have learned at a Charity School, with the exception of the parochial accomplishment of hallooing and singing of anthems.

I have entered into these personal details, though pertaining rather to illiterate than to literary reminiscences, partly because the important subject of Education has become of prominent interest, and partly to hint that a writer may often mean in earnest what he says in jest. One of my readers at least has given me credit for a serious purpose. A schoolmaster called, during the vacation, on the father of one of his pupils, and in answer to his announcement of the re-opening of his establishment, was informed that the young gentleman was not to return to the academy. The worthy parent declared that he had read the “Carnaby Correspondence," in the Comic Annual, and had made up his mind. "But, my dear Sir," expostulated the pedagogue, “you cannot be serious; why the Comic Annual is nothing but a book full of jokes!" "Yes, yes," returned the father, "but it has let me into a few of your tricks. I believe Mr. Hood. James is not coming again!"

And now it may be reasonably asked, where I did learn anything if not at these establishments, which promise Universal Knowledge-extras included—and yet unaccountably produce 80 very few Admirable Crichtons?* It may plausibly be objected, that I did not duly avail myself of such overflowing

* In spite of hundreds of associates, it has never happened to me, amongst the very many distinguished names connected with science or literature, to recognize one as belonging to a school-fellow.