MOJsTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND ART. 207 



f those abandoned miscreants who eat fish with a knife and fork ; learned 

 on all gastronomic matters ; and profoundly ignorant of the localities of 

 Russell-square ; notwithstanding all this, ' Bon Ton' fell as still-born from 

 the press, as if no royal duke had been conjectured to be its author ! 



' ''Having thus failed In fact, I thought (for the cacoethes seribendi was still 

 strong on me) I would next have recourse to fiction. Nothing venture, 

 nothing gain ; so I set about a History of Italy, with which my residence 

 at Naples had of course made me familiary acquainted. Strange to tell, 

 my book, even though filled with elaborate descriptions of Rome a city 

 which nothing but accident prevented me from visiting met with as dis- 

 couraging a reception as ' Bon Ton' nay, I may even add, a worse, for 

 on bargaining for a portmanteau a few months afterwards in Long Acre, I 

 found it lined with one of my most impassioned apostrophes to the glory of 

 ancient Rome ! 



" This was vexatious, but it was not my only grievance. Misfortunes 

 never drizzle upon a man's head. They always pour down on him in 

 torrents. The landlady, 



' Oh ! sound of fear, 



Unpleasing to an author's ear/ 



at whose house I boarded, having long suspected my condition, now began 

 to look after me with that restless curiosity which a discreet father exhibits 

 towards an only son who has evinced a predilection for the sea. At first 

 the good dame's inquisitiveness was confined within the pale of politeness ; 

 but at length as my arrears with her increased, she exchanged the oblique 

 glance for the direct frown, and daily vented her spleen in coarse allusions 

 to my appetite." 



The most original character in the work, and one fully worthy of more 

 elaborate development, is unquestionably that of Justinian Stubbs, the phi- 

 losophical fatalist. The reader will obtain some insight into the peculiar 

 moral perplexity of this worthy gentleman's idiosyncracy from the following 

 conversation : 



" This stranger, whom I soon discovered to be a piquant mixture of the 

 scamp and the pedant, making me a profound obeisance, whilst at the same 

 time he eyed me from head to foot with an air of scientific discrimination, 

 expressed' his regret at my presence in a place so ill-calculated to improve 

 my moral or physical condition. e But, Sir,' he added with amazing pomp 

 of manner, ( you have the consolation of knowing 110 matter what be the 

 cause that brought you here that you are, like myself, the victim of 

 destiny. Vice and virtue, Sir, are mere matters of impulse as I endea- 

 voured to show in a little treatise I lately wrote, entitled 'Death, the 

 fulfilment of Destiny/ for which a man is no more to be blamed or praised, 

 than he is for being short or tall, thin or stout. For my own part I have 

 come to the conclusion that, do what we will, neither the best nor worst of 

 us can control our actions, being alike mere spokes in the wheel of fate ; 

 and that the sum and substance of all human wisdom may be comprised in 

 this one sentence what will be, will be.' 



" c A very sagacious conclusion Mr. 1 beg your pardon, but may I 



ask whom I have the honour of addressing ?' I inquired, but a little amused 

 by a new companion's loquacity. 



" ' Stubbs, Sir Justinian Stubbs, late professor of language at the Hum- 

 bug Charity School a gentleman, and (I trust I may add) a scholar, who, 

 by one of those sudden vicissitudes to which the best of us are liable, has 

 been but just subjected to the unchristian persecution of the pillory.' 



'" Indeed!' 



" ' Yes, Sir, the humble individual before you has ' fretted' I would add 



