Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/179

Rh Kendal's chronometer." And then in huge amusement at Dr. Kitchiner's suggestion of "broth-diet" and a "teaspoonful of Epsom salts in half a pint of warm water," the rollicking veteran goes on more suo. "There is no great harm in acting as above; although we should recommend a screed of the Epsoms. A teaspoonful of Epsom salts in half a pint of warm water, reminds one, somehow, of Tims. A small matter works a Cockney. It is not so easy—that the Cockneys well know—to move the bowels of old Christopher North. We do not believe that a teaspoonful of anything in this world would have any serious effect on the Editor of this Magazine. We should have no hesitation to back him against so much corrosive sublimate. He would dine out on the day he had bolted that quantity of arsenic;—and would, we verily believe, rise triumphant from a teaspoonful of Prussic acid." And then he proposes his plan for dispersing symptoms of cold and catarrh, &c., out of a thousand cures he could prescribe more efficacious than the ineffably despicable regimen of broth diet, a warm room, a teaspoonful of Epsom salts, and early roosting. "What say you," he asks, in his gleeful sanguine benevolence" to half a dozen tumblers of hot toddy? Your share of a brown jug to the same amount? Or an equal quantity, that in its gradual decrease, reveals deeper and deeper still the romantic Highland scenery of the Devil's Punch Bowl? Adde tot small bearded oysters, all redolent of the salt sea foam, and worthy, as they stud the Ambrosial brodd, to be licked off all at once by the lambent tongue of Neptune. That antiquated calumny against the character of toasted cheese—that, forsooth, it is indigestible—has been trampled under the march of mind; and, therefore, you may tuck in a pound or so of double Gloucester. Other patients labouring under catarrh, may, very possibly, prefer the roasted how-towddy—or the green goose from his first stubble-field—or why not, by way of a little variety, a roasted mawkin, midway between hare and leveret, tempting as maiden between woman and girl, or, as the Eastern poet says, between a frock and a gown. Go to bed—no need of warming-pans—about a quarter before one—you will not hear that small hour strike—you will sleep sound till sunrise, sound as the Black stone at Scone; on which the Kings of Scotland were crowned of old. And if you contrive to carry a cold about you next day, you deserve to be sent to Coventry by all sensible people—and may, if you choose, begin taking, with Tims, a teaspoonful of Epsom salts in a half-pint of warm water—&c.; but if you do, be your sex, politics, or religion, what they may, never shall you be suffered again to contribute even a bit of Balaam to this Magazine."

In an author of this calibre you were not staggered by the heartiest enthusiasm for the roughest of old English sports. Whether you assented or not, you could not withhold your admiration of such a frank and thorough-going champion of national pluck, such an outspoken hater of whatever is petty, emasculate, finical, man-millinerish. You might agree with Dr. Chalmers in his sermon against fox-hunting, enforced on the ground of "cruelty to animals,"—but you could not read Christopher North's sporting articles without being caught by the furore which inspires them: "Cruelty!" he shouts, "is there cruelty in laying the rein on their necks, and delivering them up to the transport of their high condition—for every throbbing vein is visible—at the first full burst of that