Norfolk Squire of The Devil is an Ass' meets with a projector-one who pretends to influence at court to obtain monopolies-an "undertaker," who makes men's fortunes without the advance of a penny, except a mere trifle of a ring or so by way of present to the great lady who is to procure the patent. But let the projector speak for himself:

"He shall not draw

A string of 's purse; I'll drive his patent for him.
We'll take in citizens, commoners, and aldermen,

To bear the charge, and blow them off again,
Like so many dead flies, when it is carried.
The thing is for recovery of drown'd land,
Whereof the crown's to have a moiety,
If it be owner; else the crown and owners
To share that moiety, and the recoverers
To enjoy the t'other moiety for their charge.
Eng. Throughout England?

Meer. Yes; which will arise

To eighteen millions-seven the first year:
I have computed all, and made my survey !
Unto an acre."

(To be concluded in No. XXII.)

The dupe thus recounts his great fortunes to his wife :

'Wife, such a man, wife!

He has such plots! he will make me a duke!

No less, by heaven! six mares to your coach, wife!
That's your proportion! and your coachman bald,
Because he shall be bare enough. Do not you laugh;
We are looking for a place, and all, in the map,
What to be of. Have faith-be not an infidel.
You know I am not easy to be gull'd.

I swear, when I have my millions, else, I'll make

Another duchess, if you have not faith.

Mrs. Fitz. You'll have too much, I fear, in these false spirits.
Fitz. Spirits! O, no such thing, wife; wit, mere wit.

This man defies the devil and all his works;

He does 't by engine, and devices, he!

He has his winged ploughs, that go with sails,
Will plough you forty acres at once! and mills
Will spout you water ten miles off! All Crowland
Is ours, wife: and the fens, from us, in Norfolk,
To the utmost bounds in Lincolnshire! we have view'd it,
And measur'd it within all, by the scale:

The richest tract of land, love, in the kingdom!

There will be made seventeen or eighteen millions,

Or more, as 't may be handled! so therefore think,
Sweet-heart, if thou hast a fancy to one place

More than another, to be duchess of,

Now name it; I will have 't, whate'er it cost,
(If 't will be had for money,) either here,

Or in France, or Italy.

Mrs. Fitz. You have strange phantasies!"

Is this satire obsolete?

But there is another form of the passion whose permanency and universality cannot be denied. What the victims of gaming propose to themselves Jonson has delineated with inimitable humour:

The line

"There's a young gentleman

Is born to nothing-forty marks a year,
Which I count nothing:-he is to be initiated,
And have a fly of the doctor. He will win you,
By unresistible luck, within this fortnight,
Enough to buy a barony. They will set him
Upmost, at the groom-porters, all the Christmas:
And for the whole year through, at every place
Where there is play, present him with the chair;
The best attendance, the best drink; sometimes
Two glasses of Canary, and pay nothing;
The purest linen, and the sharpest knife;
The partridge next his trencher.

You shall have your ordinaries bid for him,

As playhouses for a poet; and the master

Pray him aloud what dish he affects,

Which must be butter'd shrimps: and those that drink

To no mouth else will drink to his as being

The goodly president mouth of all the board."

"You shall have your ordinaries bid for him"

will at once suggest to the reader the admirable scene in the Fortunes of Nigel,' where we breathe the very air of the ordinary of " Monsieur le Chevalier de Beaujeu, pink of Paris, and flower of Gascony." The cookery, the wine, the gaming, and the quarrelling, which Scott has so inimitably painted, are to be traced in every page of the comedies of this period. There is, however, amongst the 'Anecdotes and Traditions,' published by the Camden Society from the manuscript of Sir Nicholas L'Estrange, preserved in the Harleian collection, a story which shows us the manners of an ordinary with great truth and spirit :"Old Jack Pinchback, a gamester and ruffler in London, came into an ordinary very brave and daubed with gold-lace, and, spying a country gentleman there, resolved to whet his wit upon him for that meal, and so seated himself by him; meat was no sooner upon the table but the gentleman boards the best dish before him: Soft, friend,' says Pinchback; in such places as these, give gentlemen of quality and your betters leave to be before you.' 'Say you so?' says he; why, they tell me in the country, that, when a man comes into an ordinary at London, every man is his own carver, and eats what he has a mind to.' '0 no,' says Pinchback, take it from me, 'tis false doctrine.' The gentleman, being both wise and daring, and well enough acquainted with the fashions of London, dissembled himself; and observing that Pinchback loved his palate, as soon as the second course was set down, he had the first hand upon a pheasant. Fie!' says Pinchback; 'these country clowns neither know nor will learn good manners.' He held his pheasant for all that, and fed as fast upon it as Pinchback scoffed and played upon him; still answering that in the country he never heard of any such fashions. Well, dinner was no sooner done, and the company risen, but this country gentleman, well fleshed with the best meat, comes boldly up to Pinchback: 'I prithee,' says he, whose fool art thou? Says Pinchback,

'What's thy meaning, friend, by that?' 'Why,' says he, by the loose liberty of thy tongue, and' (shaking on him by the shoulder) by this guarded coat, I take thee for some great man's fool; but if thou beest not somebody's fool, I must beat thee. Therefore, if thou wantest that protection, meet me in St. George's Fields an hour hence, and I'll teach you new ethics, how to eat your own sword or mine.' Pinchback, seeing him so daring and resolute, wound himself off by a handsome acknowledgment and the interposing of the company, and very glad he got so rid of him."

Here we have the gamester and bully in his fine clothes, contending for the pheasant "next his trencher" with a stout country gentleman, who at length teaches the ruffler manners by the terrors of the cudgel. Every description of an ordinary has reference to the general appetite for luxurious fare, which appears to have been one of the prevailing vices both in the Court and the City in these days. The Court, in 1593, had a most singular contest with the City; and it is difficult to understand how the Court obtained a triumph without something like an insurrection of all the Liveries. Stow tells us that the Queen and the nobility put down the eating of venison in the City:-" There was excessive spending of venison, as well as other victuals, in the halls. Nay, and a great consumption of venison there was frequently at taverns and cooks'-shops, insomuch that the Court was much offended with it. Whereupon, anno 1573, that the City might not continue to give the Queen and nobility offence, the Lord Mayor, Sir Lionel Ducket, and Aldermen, had by act of Common Council forbidden such feasts hereafter to be made; and restrained the same only to necessary meetings, in which also no venison was permitted. And because they found great expense of venison to have been in taverns and cooks' houses, and withal very many and great enormities, by reason of drunkenness, seditious rumours, unthrifty assemblies, incontinence, and other evil, to grow of inordinate resorting to taverns and tippling-houses, especially for the meaner sort, they restrained drinking and eating in such houses."

The vigour of prevention was directed, it will be seen, in two quarters— against the gluttony of the halls, and that of taverns and cooks' houses "for the meaner sort." Who can doubt that the justice of the Common Council was impartial; and that the term "necessary meetings" had a very strict construction? Yet such is the inadequacy of laws that are "made for every degree," that we find in the beginning of the reign of James I. that London was one universal academy for gourmands and gourmets. The cooks, according to Jonson, were infected with principles that in an earlier age of the Reformation would have consigned them to the stake:

"Where have you greater atheists than your cooks?"

But in the more tolerant age of James, the master-cooks, whose atheism (if this quality be not a mere scandal of the poet) was derived with their professional knowledge from "the world abroad"-for travel was then necessary to make an accomplished cook-cooks were then personages that the great delighted to

honour:

"A master-cook! why, he's the man of men,

For a professor! he designs, he draws,
He paints, he carves, he builds, he fortifies,
Makes citadels of curious fowl and fish:

We have already given the passage in the Alchymist' in which Jonson pours out his learning in describing the rare but somewhat nasty dishes of ancient cookery. We doubt whether "dormice," and "camels' heels," and the "beards of barbels," and "oiled mushrooms," would really be so successful as the performances of the maître de cuisine to the Maréchal Strozzi, who, at the siege of Leith, according to Monsieur Beaujeu, "made out of the hind quarter of one salted horse forty-five couverts, that the English and Scottish officers and nobility, who had the honour to dine with Monseigneur upon the rendition, could not tell what the devil any one of them were made upon at all." The real professors of that day, according to the recommendation which Howell gives of one of them in 1630, could "marinate fish," "make jellies," were "excellent for piquant sauce and the haugou," were "passing good for an olla," understood "larding of meat after the mode of France," and decorated their victims with "chains of sausages." With these refinements prevailing amongst us two centuries ago, it is lamentable to think how we retrograded to the Saxon barbarism of sirloins and suet-dumplings.

Gifford has remarked that "Shakspere is the only one of the dramatic writers of the age of James who does not condescend to notice tobacco; all the others