more glows than one. We will not condemn her till we know, even thổugh the flap of her fan was something equivocal; nor can we allow the justice of the doctor's triumph, till we see what right he had to be so very argumentative and superior. It was too bad, in a man so amiable and so well off, to have the best of an argument, as well as a charming wife, and heaps of admiring friends, fair and brown. He should not have overthrown the ladies in a dispute, and set himself to making verses, while they were getting up.

The heretical doubt respecting the lady of sixty, in the following letter, would have perplexed poor Miss Scott. "I had on Saturday," the doctor writes to his wife," the pleasure of seeing Shakespeare's tomb and epitaph, as also the monument of a celebrated person who died at sixty, and a maid, if her tombstone fibs not. She came from Nonsuch (the Italics of this word are the doctor's own), in Surrey, and is buried at the feet of the Lady Carew, whose waiting-woman she was, and who, that she (Lady C.) might continue a maid no longer, is said to have jumped out of a window three stories high." In the chancel of Stratford church the doctor meets with "a charming lady," with whom he "would have been glad of further conversation," and who was "indeed a woman of surprising sense," though not equal to Mrs. Doddridge. He is always meeting with ladies so charming, and welcomes so delicious, and lives in such a world of love, festivity, religion, and locomotion, that he reminds us of the famous John Buncle. We should have thought John's character drawn from him, if he had married five wives, and been a Unitarian. 1830.

ON

CONFECTIONERY.

NE cannot open this book* without fancying that one scents all the good things that we see mentioned in it, the cakes, candies, creams, ices, preserved fruit, —- the raspberry tarts, and the sirups of violet. Mr. Gunter, whom "the gods have made poetical," and who quotes Greek, Latin, and Italian. for his purpose, justly claims for his art something of a superior elegance to that of all others connected. with the table. We except the Fruiterer; but his is not more of an in-door than an out-of-door art. The Fruiterer belongs to all times of the day, and all places except the high street; whereas pastry and confectionery must be eaten housed. There is a sort of sophistication connected with them which. does not do for pure nature. The little boy is the only person that can eat his bunn in the face of heaven and not be ashamed. And we suspect, that with all the helps of Mr. Gunter, no masticator of jelly cakes, or meringues, eats his felicity with half the satisfaction that he did his bunn when he was a little ⚫ boy.

The superiority of confectionery and pastry over other cookery consists in its association with fruits and grain. A cookery-book reminds one of the

The Confectioner's Oracle, containing Receipts for Desserts, &c., with others for Pastry-Cooks, and an Elucidation of the Principles of Good Cheer. Being a Companion to Dr. Kitchener's Cook's Oracle. By W. Gunter.

shambles. The Confectioner talks to us of sugars, and oranges, and violets. He lives in quite another world. He is of the garden and the dairy. Eve, who "tempered dulcet creams," was the mother of his pretty girls in the pastry shops. Cookery did not begin till after the fall. We confess, if our bad habits would let us, we would never eat joint more, but stick to this paradisiacal eating, and have blood made up of raspberries and the rose. It is not moral weakness that prompts us to the wish, any more than bodily weakness would follow it. Το get out of the necessity of beef eating, would be to get out of the necessity of excitement and clouded energy. The weakest stomachs are those which assimilate best with flesh already made. To take to a sudden course of living upon fruits and farina might endanger it; but he that had never lived on anything else would probably beat us all. The late General Elliott, whose picture, by Sir Joshua, may be seen in Pall Mall, stout, military, with a nose as energetic as his cocked hat, lived entirely on fruit and vegetables.

But to our author. Mr. Gunter seems to be two, if not "three gentlemen at once," in his book. There is, first, the gay, bantering, scholarly Gunter, superior to his trade, and tossing his quotations about him, from the Greek and Latin; there is the professional Gunter, important in his undertaking, and piquing himself on the patronage of his lords and ladies; and, finally, there is the Gunter of the frontispiece, sitting beside a table with a fowl on it, and looking as melancholy as the first is gay. He seems to have

no appetite to his dish, but rather to be deploring the bad digestion of some previous one, one of his hands being in his waistcoat, and his face looking incredulous of the pleasures of this world. This Gunter may be the second, but he ought not to have been so candid in his lemon peel. Great men cannot always afford to be seen in their simplicity. He should have given us a head of himself in its smartest condition, like Mr. Ude or Mr. Farley, and not have led the reader to suppose that a Confectioner can look mortal.

To the Gunter in his professional state we have nothing to object. We take it for granted that his cakes and jellies are made after the most exquisite fashion, otherwise the facetious Gunter could not have introduced "Earl Powis" making a speech in his favor. In the Advice to Confectioners, we have a sketch of the history of the science, more smart than satisfactory; and in the appendix we are presented, in a most unexpected and disinterested manner, with remarks on digestion, and earnest advice to take care of one's health, by air, temperance, and exercise. Such is the march of intellect, like those of the white ants, over one's very table, and so thoughtful does an eater of pastry become in spite of the vivacity of his set-to. This reminds us that Mr. Gunter may say what he pleases against cooks, as distinguished from pastry-cooks, but of all the substances taken into the daring stomachs of men, the physicians tell us (and we believe them) that there is none so difficult to conquer, and so provocative of horror in the struggle, as the compound of

flour and fried butter, known to the unsuspecting under the innocent name of pie-crust. The boy goes on bearing it for a long time, but, as he grows older, "shades of the prison house" begin to close in upon him, as Mr. Wordsworth says, - that is to say, of pie-crust; for it is clear, by the speculative melancholy of that poet, that he has been a large eater of it in his time. "The child," he says, "is father to the man," - that is, begets all the habits of the grown person; and pie-crust, he may depend upon it, is the origin of much melancholy blank verse and theological dilemma.* We except this from the innocencies of our pastry, unless our readers are fox-hunters, or run about as they did in the days when pie was bliss. In that case they may eat anything.

But we have another objection to make to the elegant Gunter, which is, that in endeavoring to exalt his art into new regions of the sweet, he becomes profane, and talks of love and the ladies! Now, we must never have two such things as love and the love of eating brought together. If eating, in its most innocent shape (as no doubt may be the case), is found in connection with love, care must be taken to distinguish one love from the other, and not confound their metaphors and their sympathies. Here is Dr.

* Holmes's Autocrat, you may remember, once took more of his landlady's pie than was good for him, and had an indigestion in consequence. "While I was suffering from it," he says, "I wrote some sadly desponding poems and a theological essay, which took a very melancholy view of creation. When I got better, I labelled them all 'Pie-Crust,' and laid them by as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but as they have great names on their title-pages, -Doctors of Divinity some of them, ED. it wouldn't do."-