1829.] Affairs in General. 553 



all, and peculiarly the domestic animals of England, with some 

 natural reflections on our duty towards the lower creation, the cruelty 

 and crime of giving them unnecessary pain, the limits within which our 

 right to use them are restricted by the laws of religion and of the land; 

 the whole tending to an improved knowledge of their nature, and a 

 heightened feeling of the duties of humanity. An institution render- 

 ing such services as those to the popular mind, would be a national 

 good, and must receive the patronage of every honest and benevolent 

 mind. 



This is the age of titles ; and as George Coleman, junior, says, " that 

 nobody is any body, until he takes the title of somebody, and is laughed 

 at by every body," we can feel no surprise at the passion for the 

 " grinning honours that Sir Robert hath." But there is a reason for 

 every tiling, and the hundreds of knights, shrewd enough in other things, 

 were not such asses in this after all. To be sure a knight, an eques 

 anraius, giving lessons upon the piano to a covey of school girls, does 

 not seem much within the original purview of the statutes of chivalry. 

 But when milliners' apprentices wear spurs, and the youthful grocerage 

 of Cheapside shine illustrious in moustachios, there is no great inequality 

 in a Sir Charles Aldis knighting it behind the green curtain and private 

 door of a receptacle for calamities that shun the day. The truth is, that 

 without a title, a man is rather in the state of that puzzle of the first 

 form, that school anomaly, a noun-adjective, that cannot stand by itself. 

 The lesson in flats and sharps is so much money thrown away, unless the 

 piano-man be a Sir Something or other. The lady-mother takes no pride 

 in recounting the " enormous sums that Laura IMaria has cost her for the 

 last twenty years of tuition," unless she can add, that those sums have 

 had the honour to be received by a knight. Laura JMaria herself feels 

 the want of dignity in the transaction, acknowledges the name of her 

 untitled teacher with the reluctance natural to so painful a confession, 

 and gives up her secret like one on the rack. 



If an old she sinner of rank is visited for her sins by the gout, and the 

 secret love of liqueurs at length transpires to mankind in the shape of 

 three attacks a day, does any one who knows womankind above fifty, and 

 five hundred a year, conceive the possibility of her applying to the v/is- 

 dom of any man not illustrated by the king's touch } Dr. Scudamore felt 

 this keenly, before he made up his mind to run the chance of being 

 drowned in the Irish Channel, besides being devoured alive or dead 

 at his landing among the anthropophagi that line its shores. But a man 

 whose profession is death, should be a hero. The doctor girded his 

 breast with the " ]E% triplex," committed himself to the tossings, trem- 

 blings, boilings, and blowings up of the Meteor steamer, luckily escaped 

 the voracity of the natives, and has luckily been reimported, like 

 a bale of manufactured goods returned to the country of the raw material, 

 transformed into Sir Augustus Cambyses Scudamoi'e. He was a toler- 

 able expeller of the podagra before, but he seldom soared above the toe 

 of a common councilman, or of an old maid living in Paddington or Pye- 

 comer, and desirous of peculiar secrecy in the name of the person 

 employed to relieve her of her calcareous formations. But now he 

 flourishes like a green bay tree; his horn is exalted, he fcedeth in the 

 rich pastures of Portman-square, and Portland-crescent ; and when we 

 shall have occasion to indulge ourselves with a fit of the gout, we shall 

 M.M. New Series.— Yoi..Y\U. No. 47. A B 



