mean any play upon the word,) there to be dieted upon bread and water until they had completely filled one another's albums with poetry of their own composing; after which process, I believe they might be turned loose upon society without danger of their resuming the trade of begging. Other mendicant nuisances occur to me, for whose suppression the proposed Institution would be held responsible; but I have filled my limits for the present, and shall therefore leave them to form the subject of a future communication.

STANZAS TO PUNCHINELLO.

THOU lignum-vitæ Roscius, who
Dost the old vagrant stage renew,
Peerless, inimitable Punchinello!

The Queen of smiles is quite outdone
By thee, all-glorious king of fun,

Thou grinning, giggling, laugh-extorting fellow!

At other times mine ear is wrung
Whene'er I hear the trumpet's tongue,

Waking associations melancholic;

But that which heralds thee recalls

All childhood's joys and festivals,

And makes the heart rebound with freak and frolic.

Ere of thy face I get a snatch,

O with what boyish glee I catch

Thy twittering, cackling, bubbling, squeaking gibber— Sweeter than syren voices-fraught

With richer merriment than aught

That drops from witling mouths, though utter'd glibber!

What wag was ever known before

To keep the circle in a roar,

Nor wound the feelings of a single hearer?
Engrossing all the jibes and jokes,
Unenvied by the duller folks,

A harmless wit-an unmalignant jeerer.

The upturn'd eyes I love to trace
Of wondering mortals, when their face

Is all alight with an expectant gladness;
To mark the flickering giggle first,
The growing grin—the sudden burst,

And universal shout of merry madness.

I love those sounds to analyse,

From childhood's shrill ecstatic cries,

To age's chuckle with its coughing after;

To see the grave and the genteel

Rein in awhile the mirth they feel,

Then loose their muscles, and let out the laughter.

Sometimes I note a hen-peck'd wight,

Enjoying thy marital might,

To him a beatific beau-idéal;

He counts each crack on Judy's pate,

Then homeward creeps to cogitate

The difference 'twixt dramatic wives and real.

But, Punch, thou'rt ungallant and rude

In plying thy persuasive wood;

Remember that thy cudgel's girth is fuller

Than that compassionate, thumb-thick,

Establish'd wife-compelling stick,

Made legal by the dictum of Judge Buller.

When the officious doctor hies

To cure thy spouse, there's no surprise

Thou shouldst receive him with nose-tweaking grappling;

Nor can we wonder that the mob

Encores each crack upon his nob,

When thou art feeing him with oaken sapling.

As for our common enemy

Old Nick, we all rejoice to see

The

de
coup grace

that silences his wrangle;

But, lo, Jack Ketch !-ah, welladay!

Dramatic justice claims its prey,

And thou in hempen handkerchief must dangle.

Now helpless hang those arms which once

Rattled such music on the sconce ;

Hush'd is that tongue which late out-jested Yorick; That hunch behind is shrugg'd no more,

No longer heaves that paunch before,

Which swagg'd with such a pleasantry plethoric.

But Thespian deaths are transient woes,
And still less durable are those

Suffer'd by lignum-vitæ malefactors;

Thou wilt return, alert, alive,

And long, oh long may'st thou survive,

First of head-breaking and side-splitting actors!

FIRST LETTER TO THE ROYAL LITERARY SOCIETY.

"Our court shall be a little academy."-SHAKSPEARE.
"Doctor, I want you to mend my cacology."-Heir at Law.

CANDOUR requires, Mr. Secretary, that I should commence my letter by confessing the doubts I once entertained as to the necessity of any such establishment as that which I have now the honour to address; for, at a time when our booksellers evince such unprecedented

munificence, that no author of the least merit is left unrewarded, while all those of superior talent acquire wealth as well as fame, it did appear to me that our writers needed no chartered patrons or royal remunerators. At the first public meeting, however, of the Society, the President having most logically urged the propriety of such an institution, because this country had become "pre-eminently distinguished by its works of history, poetry, and philology," without the assistance of any corporate academy; while they had long possessed one in France, (where literature had been notoriously stationary or retrograde from the period of its establishment), I could not resist the force of this double argument, and am now not only convinced that it is necessary to give to our literature “ a corporate character and representation," but prepared, as far as my humble abilities extend, to forward the objects of the Society, by hastening to accept its invitation for public contributions. Aware that the model of the French Academy should always be kept in view, and remembering the anecdote recorded by M. Grimm, one of its members, who died in the greatest grammatical dilemma as to whether he should say "Je m'en vais," or, "je m'en va, dans l'autre monde," I shall limit my attention to considerations of real importance, particularly to such as may conduce "to the improvement of our language, and the correction of capricious deviations from its native purity," such being one of the main objects proposed in the President's address. Not having time, in this my first letter, to methodize all my suggestions, I shall loosely throw upon paper such observa

tions as have occurred to me in a hasty and superficial view of the subject.

Nothing forms so violent a deviation from philological purity as a catachresis. We sneer at the slipslop of uneducated life, and laugh at Mrs. Malaprop upon the stage; yet what so common in colloquial language as to hear people talk of wooden tombstones, iron milestones, glass ink-horns, brass shoeing-horns, iron coppers, and copper hand-irons ?-We want a substitute for the phrase going on board an iron steamboat, and a new verb for expressing its motion, which is neither sailing nor rowing: these are desiderata which the Society cannot too speedily supply, considering the prodigious extension of that mode of conveyance.-Many expressions are only catachrestical in sound, yet require emendation as involving an apparently ludicrous contradiction: such, for instance, as the farmer's speech to a nobleman at Newmarket, whose horse had lost the first race and won the second:- "Your horse, my lord, was very backward in coming forward; he was behind before, but he's first at last."-I myself lately encountered a mounted friend in Piccadilly, who told me he was going to carry his horse to Tattersall's, whereas the horse was carrying him thither, an absurdity which could not occur in France, where (owing, doubtless, to the Academy) they have the three words porter, mener, and amener, which prevent all confusion of that nature, unless when spoken by the English, who uniformly misapply them.-All blackberries being of a wan or rosy hue in their unripe state, we may with perfect truth affirm, that every blackberry is either white or red when it is green; which sounds like a violent catachresis, and

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