grand Roman Girandola shot off from the mole of Adrian, to the annual delight of modern "Quirites," are all fine things and rubicund in their generation; but nothing to the star of Watergrasshill. Nor is astronomical science or pyrotechnics the only department of philosophy that has been influenced by this extraordinary meteor-the kindred study of GASTRONOMY has derived the hint of a new combination from its inspiring ray; and, after a rapid perusal of " Prout's Apology for Fish," the celebrated Monsieur Ude, whom Croquis has so exquisitely delineated in the gallery of REGINA, has invented on the spot an original sauce, a novel obsonium, more especially adapted to cod and turbot, t which he has given the reverend father's name; so that Sir William Curtis will be found eating his "turbot a la Prout " as constantly as his "cotelette à la Maintenon." The fascinating Miss Landon has had her fair name affixed to a frozen lake in the map of Captain Ross's discoveries; and if Prout be not equally fortunate in winning terraqueous renown with his pen, ("Nititur pennâ vitreo daturus nomina ponto"), he will at least figure on the "carte" neighbour Verey's.

at our

Who can tell what posthumous destinies await the late incumbent of Watergrasshill? In truth, his celebrity (to use an expression of Edmund Burke) is as yet but a "speck in the horizon-a small seminal principle, rather than a formed body;" and when, in the disemboguing of the chest, in the evolving of his MSS., he shall be unfolded to the view in all his dimensions, developing his proportions in a gorgeous shape of matchless originality and grandeur, then will be the hour for the admirers of the beautiful and the votaries of the sublime to hail him with becoming veneration, and welcome him with the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of music.(Dan. viii. 15.)

"Then shall the reign of mind commence on earth,
And, starting fresh, as from a second birth,

Man, in the sunshine of the world's new spring,
Shall walk transparent, like some holy thing!!!

Then, too, your prophet from his angel-brow
Shall cast the veil that hides its splendour now,
And gladden'd earth shall, through her wide expanse,
Bask in the glories of his countenance !"

The title of this second paper taken from the Prout Collection is enough to indicate that we are only firing off the small arms-the pop-guns of this stupendous arsenal, and that we reserve the heavy metal for a grander occasion, when the Whig ministry and the dog days shall be over, and a merry autumn and a Wellington administration shall mellow our October cups. To talk of Tom Moore is but small talk-in tenui labor, at tenuis non gloria;" for Prout's great art is to magnify what is little, and to fling a dash of the sublime into a two-penny-post communication. To use Tommy's own phraseology, Prout could, with great ease and comfort to himself,

"Teach an old cow pater-noster,

And whistle Moll Roe to a pig."

But we have another reason for selecting this "Essay on Moore" from the papers of the deceased divine. We have seen with regret an effort made to crush and annihilate the young author of a book on the "Round Towers of Ireland," with whom we are not personally acquainted, but whose production gave earnest of an ardent mind bent on abstruse and recondite studies; and who, leaving the frivolous boudoir and the drawing-room coterie to lisp their ballads and retail their Epicurean gossip unmolested, trod alone the craggy steeps of venturous discovery in the regions of Oriental learning; whence, returning to the isle of the west, the "IRan of the fire-worshipper," he trimmed his lamp, well fed with the fragrant oil of these sunny lands, and penned a work which will one day rank among the most extraordinary of modern times. The "Edinburgh Review" attempted, long ago, to stifle the unfledged muse of Byron; these truculent northerns would gladly have bruised in the very shell the young eagle that afterwards tore with his lordly talons both Jeffery and his colleague Moore (of the leadless pistol), who were glad to wax subservient slaves, after being impotent bullies. The same review undertook to cry down Wordsworth and Coleridge; they shouted their vulgar "crucifigatur" against Robert Southey; and seemed to have adopted the motto of the French club of witlings,

"Nul n'aura de l'esprit que nous et nos amis."

But in the present case they will find themselves equally

impotent for evil: O'Brien may defy them. He may defy his own alma mater, the silent and unproductive Trin. Coll. Dub.; he may defy the Royal Irish Academy, a learned assembly, which, alas! has neither a body to be kicked, nor a soul to be damned; and may rest secure of the applaus which sterling merit challenges from every freeborn inhabitant of these islands,

"Save where, from yonder ivy-mantled tower,
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of those who, venturing near her silent bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign."

Moore (we beg his pardon)—the reviewer, asserts that O'Brien is a plagiary, and pilfered his discovery from "Nimrod." Now we venture to offer a copy of the commentaries of Cornelius a Lapide (which we find in Prout's chest) to Tom, if he will shew us a single passage in "Nimrod" (which we are confident he never read) warranting his assertion. But, apropos of plagiarisms; let us hear the prophet of Watergrasshill, who enters largely on the subject.

Regent Street, 1st August, 1834.

OLIVER YORKE.

Watergrasshill, Feb. 1834.

THAT notorious tinker, William Woods, who, as I have recorded among the papers in my coffer somewhere, to spite my illustrious father, kidnapped me in my childhood, little dreamt that the infant Prout would one day emerge from the Royal Cork Foundling Hospital as safe and unscathed as the children from Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, to hold up his villany to the execration of mankind:

"Non sine Dîs animosus infans!"

Among the Romans, whoever stole a child was liable by law to get a sound flogging; and as plaga in Latin means a stripe, or lash, kidnappers in Cicero's time were called plagiarii, or cat-o'-nine-tail-villains. I approve highly of this law of the twelve tables; but perhaps my judgment is biassed,

and I should be an unfair juror to give a verdict in a case which comes home to my own feelings so poignantly. The term plagiary has since been applied metaphorically to literary shop-lifters and book-robbers, who stuff their pages with other men's goods, and thrive on indiscriminate pillage. This is justly considered a high misdemeanour in the republic of letters, and the lash of criticism is unsparingly dealt on pickpockets of this description. Among the Latins, Martial is the only classic author by whom the term plagiarius is used in the metaphorical sense, as applied to literature; but surely it was not because the practice only began in his time that the word had not been used even in the Augustan age of Rome. Be that as it may, we first find the term in Martial's Epigrams (lib. i. epigr. 53): talking of his verses, he says,

"Dicas esse meos, manuque missos:

Hoe si terque quaterque clamitâris,
Impones plagiario pudorem."

Cicero himself was accused by the Greeks of pilfering whole passages, for his philosophical works, from the scrolls of Athens, and cooking up the fragments and broken meat of Greek orations to feed the hungry barbarians of the Roman forum. My authority is that excellent critic St. Jerome, who, in the "Proemium in qu. Heb. lib. Genesis," distinctly says, "Cicero repetundarum accusatur à Græcis," &c. &c.; and in the same passage he adds, that Virgil being accused of taking whole similes from Homer, gloried in the theft, exclaiming, "Think ye it nothing to wrest his club from Hercules ?" (it. ibidem.) Vide Seti Hieronymi Opera, tom. iv. fol. 90. But what shall we say when we find Jerome accusing another holy father of plagiarism? Verily the temptation must have been very great to have shaken the probity of St. Ambrose, when he pillaged his learned brother in the faith, Origen of Alexandria, by wholesale. "Nuper Sanctus Ambrosius Hexaemeron illius compilavit" (SeHieronymi Opera, tom. iii. fol. 87, in epistola ad Pammach). It is well known that Menander and Aristophanes were mercilessly pillaged by Terence and Plautus; and the Latin freebooters