that the lining of a civic purse would superinduce a very passable factitious nap upon a thread-bare title. The young lady had received an expensive and complicated education; complete in all the elements of superficial display. She was thus eminently qualified to be the companion of any masculine luminary who had kept due pace with the "astounding progress" of intelligence. It must be confessed, that a man who has not kept due pace with it, is not very easily found: this march being one of that "astounding" character in which it seems impossible that the rear can be behind the van. The young lady was also tolerably goodlooking north of Tweed, or in Palestine, she would probably have been a beauty; but for the vallies of the Thames, she was perhaps a little too much to the taste of Solomon, and had a nose which rather too

prominently suggested the idea of the tower of Lebanon, which looked towards Damascus.

In a village in the vicinity of the Castle was the vicarage of the Reverend Doctor Folliott, a gentleman endowed with a tolerable stock of learning, an interminable swallow, and an indefatigable pair of lungs. His preeminence in the latter faculty gave occasion to some etymologists to ring changes on his name, and to decide that it was derived from Follis Optimus, softened through an Italian medium, into Folle Ottimo, contracted poetically into Folleotto, and elided Anglicé into Folliott, signifying a first-rate pair of bellows. He claimed to be descended lineally from the illustrious Gilbert Folliott, the eminent theologian, who was a Bishop of London in the twelfth century, whose studies were inter

rupted in the dead of night by the Devil; when a couple of epigrams passed between them; and the Devil, of course, proved the smaller wit of the two.*

* The devil began: (he had caught the bishop musing on politics.)

Oh Gilberte Folliot!

Dum revolvis tot et tot,

Deus tuus est Astarot.

Oh Gilbert Folliott!

While thus you muse and plot,

Your god is Astarot.

The bishop answered :

Tace, dæmon: qui est deus

Sabbaot, est ille meus.

Peace, fiend ; the power I own

Is Sabbaoth's Lord alone.

It must be confessed, the devil was easily posed in the twelfth century. He was a sturdier disputant in the sixteenth.

Did not the devil appear to Martin
Luther in Germany for certain?

when "the heroic student," as Mr. Coleridge calls him,

C

This reverend gentleman, being both learned and jolly, became by degrees an indispensable ornament to the new squire's table. Mr. Crotchet himself was eminently jolly, though by no means eminently learned. In the latter respect he took after the great majority of the sons of his father's land; had a smattering of many things, and a knowledge of none; but possessed the true northern art of making the most of his intellectual harlequin's jacket, by keeping the best patches always bright and prominent.

was forced to proceed to "voies de fait." The curious may see at this day, on the wall of Luther's study, the traces of the ink-bottle which he threw at the devil's head.

CHAP. II.

THE MARCH OF MIND.

Quoth Ralpho: nothing but the abuse
Of human learning you produce.

BUTLER.

"GOD bless my soul, sir!" exclaimed the Reverend Doctor Folliott, bursting, one fine May morning, into the breakfast-room at Crotchet Castle, I am out of all patience with this march of mind. Here has my house been nearly burned down, by my cook taking it into her head to study Hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract, published by the Steam Intellect Society, and written by a learned friend who is for doing all the world's business as well as his own, and is equally well qualified to handle every branch of human knowledge.