Why several worthy gentlemen that were about to be very happy, become suddenly uncomfortable, go home in a bad humor, and quarrel with their wives about small domestic grievances. How much is virtue into pocket by this? At public dinners (such an one as was given some time since to our gifted townsman, Washington Irving,) would you excommunicate wine and spirits? Would you have all generous toasts and sentiments washed down with cold water? What an agreeable fervor would pervade the company! At patriotic celebrations, too, think, oh think, of the "immortal memory of George Washington" in pure spring, or the "American fair,” in a bumper of the best rock, Manhattan, or other waters of local notoriety! Is such a scheme feasible; and, if it were, is it desirable? Have the lords of the creation to follow the example of the cattle of the fields and other inferior animals? Then why was a discriminating palate given to man? Water is highly commendable and agreeable in many respects. It is useful in poetry, and poetical in reality. In a landscape, for instance, what life and animation does it impart to the prospect; how sweetly it gurgles and tinkles in a rivulet; and into what a resplendent blaze of beauty it heightens a fine sunset! But when presented to the eye on a small scale, that is, in a tumbler-it becomes insignificant and contemptible, and altogether unworthy the notice of any person pretending to rationality. Oh ladies, ladies, rescind your resolutions; but at the same time beware-beware of men that drink alone, and of those who drink standing at the bars of taverns; such persons drink for the gross love of liquor; beware of gluttons, sots and habitual tipplers; but also beware of unadulterated waterdrinkers. BULWER AND WALTER SCOTT. THIS is the age of discoveries—of wonderful and astounding discoveries. A spirit of fermentation and free inquiry has got abroad, and put that restless little animal man into a state of preternatural disquietude, insomuch that he has adopted for the sober rule of his conduct Shakspeare's hibernicism, "We will strive with impossibilities, and he lightly projects schemes and broaches doctrines that would have made the hair stand on end upon the heads of his respectable ancestors. The world never saw such times. Science and quackery have become so intermixed, that worthy though obtuse people are puzzled to discover the difference, and hence spring those two large parties-the innovators and the anti-innovators-that keep society fermenting like a barrel of ale at mid summer. In the eyes of the former, nothing is good but what is new; they are for turning the poor old world topsy-turvy, for shaking religion, poetry, law, learning and common sense out of it, and governing it hereafter by steam, mathematics, and a sublime code of morals calculated for use when the era of human perfectibility commences. The anti-innovation faction are ridiculous in another way they are good fat sort of people, full of beef, beer, and prejudice, who are continually "perplexed with fear of change;" who think that time and custom sanctify all things, and that whatever has been, ought to be. Their ranks are headed by grave, solemn old owls, who shut their eyes to the light in a very owlish manner, while the recruits of the other are, for the most part, pert, prating jackdaws, dressed out in the borrowed robes of philosophy and philanthropy, and their cackle is worse than the croak of their opponents, inasmuch as it is more intrusive and presuming, the one being active ignorance, the other only passive. Thank heaven, a third party with knowledge of their own, unite the zeal of one faction with the caution of the other. Such being the state of things, the number of sublime and ridiculous discoveries daily made in physics, metaphysics, law, government, and litera ture, are scarcely to be wondered at. But the most notable discovery of modern times is, undoubtedly, the one recently made, that Edward Lytton Bulwer is a writer equal to Sir Walter Scott! The author of Pelham, Devereux, and the Disowned, equal to the author of Waverley! And this is in strict accordance with the spirit of the age, which is characterized by nothing so much as mutability and love of change. The Athenians grew tired of always hearing Aristides called "the just," and a section of the literary world are tired of hearing Sir Walter styled "the great," and have therefore set up this opposition idol, whose claims, they say, have been weighed in the balance and not found wanting. It has long been the fashion to estimate men of genius after the manner of "Plutarch's Lives," by their comparative rather than their positive merits, and some singular, and it is now confessed, outrageous comparisons, have been instituted. By many of the writers of his own time Shakspeare was adjudged to be inferior to Ben Jonson; but with this solitary exception, the hardihood of the preceding assertion has perhaps never been equalled. To be sure, for some time past, Sir Walter Scott, like the Bay of Naples, has been a standard for small comparisons; and the several admirers of all the second and third-rate novelists |