before your House of Commons. Poulett Thomson is right to call attention to the cries of the shipowners, and to that dismal howling from the harbours, described by the prophet as the forerunner of the fall of Babylon.

"The best remedial measure would be a resumption of fish-diet during a portion of the year. Talk not of a resumption of cash payments, of opening the trade to China, or of finding a north-west passage to national prosperity. Talk not of calling spirits from the vasty deep,' when you neglect to elicit food and employment for thousands from its exuberant bosom. Visionary projectors are never without some complex system of beneficial improvement; but I would say of them, in the words of an Irish gentleman who has lately travelled in search of religion,

They nay talk of the nectar that sparkled for Helen-
Theirs is a fiction, but this is reality.'

Melodies.

Demand would create supply. Flotillas would issue from every sea-port in the spring, and ransack the treasures of the ocean for the periodical market: and the wooden walls of Old England, instead of crumbling into so much rotten timber, would be converted into so many huge wooden spoons to feed the population.

"It has been sweetly sung, as well as wisely said, by a genuine English writer, that

'Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark, unfathom'd caves of ocean bear.'

To these undiscovered riches Lent would point the national eye, and direct the national energies. Very absurd would then appear the forebodings of the croakers, who with some plausibility now predict the approach of national bankruptcy and famine. Time enough to think of that remote contingency when the sea shall be exhausted of its live bullion, and the abyss shall cry Hold, enough!' Time enough to fear a general stoppage, when the run on the Dogger Bank shall have produced a failure-when the shoals of the teeming north shall have refused to meet their engagements in the sunny waters of the south, and the drafts of the net shall have been dishonoured.

"I admire Edmund Burke; who in his speech on Ameri

can conciliation, has an argumentum piscatorium quite to my fancy. Tolle! lege!

"As to the wealth which these colonies have derived from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought these acquisitions of value; for they even seemed to excite your envy. And yet the spirit with which that enterprising employment has been exercised ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? Look at the manner in which the people of New England have carried on their fishery. While we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, penetrating into the deepest recesses of Hudson's Bay; while we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold,—that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know, that while some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the shores of Brazil: no sea that is not vexed by their fisheries, no climate that is not witness to their toils!"

"Such glorious imaginings and beatific dreams would (I speak advisedly) be realised in these countries by Lent's magic spell; and I have no doubt that our patriot King, the patron of so many very questionable reforms, will see the propriety of restoring the laws of Elizabeth in this matter. Stanislaus, the late pious king of Lorraine, so endeared himself to his subjects in general, and market-gardeners in particular, by his sumptuary regulations respecting vegetable diet in Lent, that in the hortus siccus of Nancy his statue has been placed, with an appropriate inscription:

'Vitales inter succos herbasque salubres,
Quàm benè stat populi vita salusque sui!'

"A similar compliment would await his present Majesty

William IV. from the shipowners and the 'worshipful Fishmongers' Company,' if he should adopt the suggestion thrown out here. He would figure colossally in Trafalgar Square, pointing with his trident to Hungerford Market. The three-pronged instrument in his hand would be a most appropriate emblem (much more so than on the pinnacle of Buckingham Palace), since it would signify equally well the fork with which he fed his people, and the sceptre with which he ruled the world.

'Le trident de Neptune est le sceptre du monde!'

"Then would be solved the grand problem of the Corn-law question. Hitherto my Lord Fitzwilliam has taken nothing by his motions. But were Lent proclaimed at Charing Cross and Temple Bar, and through the market towns of England, a speedy fall in the price of grazing stock, though it might afflict Lord Althorp, would eventually harmonise the jarring interests of agriculture and manufacturing industry. The superabundant population of the farming districts would crowd to the coast, and find employment in the fisheries; while Devonshire House would repudiate for a time the huge sirloin, and receiving as a substitute the ponderous turbot, Spitalfields would exhibit on her frugal board salt ling flanked with potatoes. A salutary taste for fish would be created in the inmost recesses of the island, an epoch most beneficial to the country would take date from that enactment.

'Omne quum Proteus pecus egit altos
Visere montes.'

Nor need the landlords take alarm. People would not plough the ground less because they might plough the deep more; and while smiling Ceres would still walk through our isle with her horn of plenty, Thetis would follow in her train with a rival cornucopia.

"Mark the effects of this observance in Ireland, where it continues in its primitive austerity, undiminished, unshorn of its beams. The Irish may be wrong, but the consequences to Protestant England are immense. To Lent you owe the connexion of the two islands; it is the golden link that binds the two kingdoms together. Abolish fasting,

and from that evil hour no beef or pork would be suffered by the wild natives to go over to your English markets; and the export of provisions would be discontinued by a people that had unlearned the lessons of starvation. Adieu to shipments of live stock and consignments of bacon! Were there not some potent mysterious spell over this country, think you we should allow the fat of the land to be everlastingly abstracted? Let us learn that there is no virtue in Lent, and repeal is triumphant to-morrow. We are in truth a most abstemious race. Hence our great superiority over our Protestant fellow-countrymen in the jury-box. It having been found that they could never hold out against hunger as we can, when locked up, and that the verdict was generally carried by popish obstinacy, former administrations discountenanced our admission to serve on juries at all. By an oversight of Sergeant Lefroy, all this has escaped the framers of the new jury bill for Ireland.

"To return to the Irish exports. The principal item is that of pigs. The hog is as essential an inmate of the Irish cabin as the Arab steed of the shepherd's tent on the plains of Mesopotamia. Both are looked on as part of the household; and the affectionate manner in which these dumb friends of the family are treated, here as well as there, is a trait of national resemblance, denoting a common origin. We are quite oriental in most of our peculiarities. The learned Vallancey will have it, that our consanguinity is with the Jews. I might elucidate the colonel's discovery, by shewing how the pig in Ireland plays the part of the scape-goat of the Israelites: he is a sacred thing, gets the run of the kitchen, is rarely molested, never killed, but alive and buoyant leaves the cabin when taken off by the landlord's driver for arrears of rent, and is then shipped clean out of the country, to be heard of no more. Indeed, the pigs of Ireland bear this notable resemblance to their cousins of Judea, that nothing can keep them from the sea,a tendency which strikes all travellers in the interior of the island whenever they meet our droves of swine precipitating themselves towards the outports for shipment.

"To ordinary observers this forbearance of the most ill-fed people on the face of the globe towards their pigs would appear inexplicable; and if you have read the legend of

Saint Anthony and his pig, you will understand the value of their resistance to temptation.

66

They have a great resource in the potato. This capital esculent grows nowhere in such perfection, not even in America, where it is indigenous. But it has often struck me that a great national delinquency has occurred in the sad neglect of people in this country towards the memory of the great and good man who conferred on us so valuable a boon, on his return from the expedition to Virginia. To Sir Walter Raleigh no monument has yet been erected, and nothing has been done to repair the injustice of his contemporaries. His head has rolled from the scaffold on Tower Hill; and though he has fed with his discovery more families, and given a greater impulse to population, than any other benefactor of mankind, no testimonial exists to commemorate his benefaction. Nelson has a pillar in Dublin :in the city of Limerick a whole column has been devoted to Spring Rice!! and the mighty genius of Raleigh is forgotten. I have seen some animals feed under the majestic oak on the acorns that fell from its spreading branches (glande sues læti), without once looking up to the parent tree that showered down blessings on their ungrateful heads."

Here endeth the "Apology," and so abruptly terminate my notes of Prout's Lenten vindicia. But, alas! still more abrupt was the death of this respectable divine, which occurred last month, on Shrove Tuesday. There was a peculiar fitness in the manner of Anacreon's exit from this life; but not so in the melancholy termination of Prout's abstemious career, an account of which is conveyed to me in a long and pathetic letter from my agent in Ireland. It was well known that he disliked revelry on all occasions; but if there was a species of gormandising which he more especially abhorred, it was that practised in the parish on pancakenight, which he frequently endeavoured to discountenance and put down, but unsuccessfully. Oft did he tell his rude auditors (for he was a profound Hellenist) that such orgies had originated with the heathen Greeks, and had been even among them the source of many evils, as the very name shewed, παν κακον! So it would appear, by Prout's etymology of the pancake, that in the English language there