Page:Fitzgerald - Pickwickian manners and customs (1897).djvu/65

 "Wot did he do it for, sir?" reiterated Sam. "Wy, in support of his great principle that crumpets was wholesome, and to show that he vouldn't be put out of his vay for nobody!"

Thus Dickens marvellously enriched this quaint story. It may be found amusing to trace the genesis of the tale. In Boswell it runs: "Mr. Fitzherbert, who loved buttered muffins, but durst not eat them because they disagreed with his stomach, resolved to shoot himself, and then eat three buttered muffins for breakfast, knowing that he should not be troubled with indigestion." We find that De Quincey, in one of his essays, reports the case of an officer holding the rank of lieutenant-colonel who could not tolerate a breakfast without muffins. But he suffered agonies of indigestion. "He would stand the nuisance no longer, but yet, being a just man, he would give Nature one final chance of reforming her dyspeptic atrocities. Muffins therefore being laid at one angle of the table and pistols at the other, with rigid equity the