but few men who could boast of a larger bump of Alimentiveness than he. To satisfy the craving which this bump excited, he had recourse, during the latter days of his career, to many expedients to raise means for its gratification; and, among others, he issued a proposal to publish a couple of volumes, under the title of My Saddle-bags,' which, however, never proceeded further than the subscription-paper, and the payment to himself of the money. With the proceeds he contrived to eat on a little longer than he might otherwise have done, till at length poor Lingham got the cold shoulder at the club, and no shoulder at home; and, in the course of a few years thereafter, he took his last journey, with his unwritten Saddlebags,' to that country from which 'no traveller returns,' leaving, however, behind him a culinary fame which may keep his name longer in remembrance than the great mass of his more frugal, more active, and less gluttonous club companions." Then, again, there was the Coul Club, so called after that famous ancient monarch of Britain, of whom the old ballad thus speaks: "Old King Coul Was a merry old soul." The Coul Club, when first instituted, and for many years thereafter, was composed, we are told, of a goodly knot of men of credit and renown, perhaps rather above the class to which John Gilpin belonged. They had their "Book of the Coul," which, in point of antiquity and truth, is not inferior either to the once celebrated Chaldee MSS. of Blackwood, or the lately-discovered Talmud of the Mormons. In imitation of the practice of the ancient king and his knights, each member of the brotherhood was obliged, at their meetings, to sport a thick wauked coul or night-cap, just as a bench of barristers are obliged to cover their craniums, even in the dog-days, with large horsehair wigs, when sitting or pleading before the judges in Westminster. Each of the members, on taking his seat, was dubbed a knight, with some alliterative title, as Sir Percival Parchment, and Sir Roderick Random: "Of the knights of the Coul, one only can here be particularly consecrated; but, of a verity, he was one well worthy of registration, and may prove mayhap a key to many more of his club companions. The knight to whom we allude was designated Sir Faustus Type; and while to the few who still live to recollect the title and its bearer, it must excite most agreeable recollections, to ourselves it is pregnant with mixed sentiments of pleasure and regret. This worthy and tasteful little man owed his title to a long and familiar acquaintanceship with long primer and brevier, and to the elegant use of these for expressing the thoughts of others. In this respect, he filled up the gap in the printing chronology of Glasgow, from the time when the last of the Foulises ceased to overlook the classical chase, and before either Khull or Hedderwick had taken up the composingstick. To those who knew Sir Faustus best, memory can not fail to retrace the many happy hours which his company created, which developed all the inherent goodness of his honest heart, and awakened in ourselves the first ambitious dreams of an embryo littérateur. The bland dignity of his demeanor, and the complacency of his goodhumored countenance, when, tired of sipping his toddy-for he was always temperate, either in the knightly or regal chair-he called, as he was often wont, for something nice;' and the rueful look of disappointment, when the call failed to produce the wing of a chicken, garnished with the thinnest slice of Westphalia or Yorkshire, can not fail to be remembered by every surviving member of the Coul Club. He was, in sooth, a choice little knight, yet certainly seen to the greatest advantage, not in the Coul hall, but in his own snug dining-room, surrounded by the rarest and most valuable engravings that the burins of Strange, Wille, Woolett, Sharpe, Morghen, or Houbracken ever produced; and by the most choice large-paper copies, in costly binding, of books which would have put a modern Maitlander into raptures, and would have certainly made Dr. Frognal Dibdin, had he seen them, leap and roar with joy. Methinks we yet see the little trigly-dressed knight, sitting in his elbow-chair-alas! many long years ago with his silver snuff-box in his left hand, directing thereon with peculiar vigor the fingers of his right, while the silence of admiration by the pithy exclamaeye glistened around the walls, and he broke tion: 'Show me a sight like that in Glasgow ! and yet these belong to a tradesman!' Crotchets to be sure he had, and who is he of any note who has them not? But, assuredly, among the many who, in this city, have passed through a club to their grave, few possessed more of the milk of human kindness than did this dapper knight and king of the Coul." his Among the better known literary knights of the Coul, we must not omit James Sheridan Knowles, who, under the title of Sir Jeremy Jingle, often delighted the chapter with his speeches, songs, and Irish stories. The author of "Virginius" was then in the heyday of life, full of fun and frolic; and few would have augured that, while sitting under a Kilmarnock coul, he would one day exchange it for a Methodist cassock! From the New Monthly Magazine. THE AUTHOR OF MARY BARTON. THAT "genteel watering place," B, was so full of gentility when the doctors packed me off thither, on sanitary thoughts intent, that the only "eligible apartments" to be met with were on the second floor of the circulating library. So there I took up my rest. The doctors had been sanguine with one consent-and if none can decide when doctors disagree, who, when they agree, could think of demurring?that the air and quiet of B would be the re-making of me. But Hygeia was coy. The stock of health which I took with me was small at the beginning, and it pleased Heaven to diminish it on further acquaintance with that genteel watering-place. In short, I was to all intents and purposes bed-ridden-living did languish, and languishing did almost die. Meanwhile, however, there was reserved to me-whether for my boon or bane, tastes and casuistry may dispute-the faculty of reading without fatigue (but then 'twas very light reading) the whole day long: alone, and destitute of other resources, my only secular solace was to deal with the book-stores below, to overhaul the catalogue and make inroads on the shelves of the "shop," to draw novel conclusions from the ground-floor premises -in a word, to make free with the Tales of my Landlord down stairs. larize the Shakspearean plural) — trifle, light as air. Not that one and all were to be dealt with in this trifling way. Some there were that it must have cost genius to design, and good intellectual bone and muscle to work off; for they required time and thought to read, and in certain instances even made the head ache with moody speculation, and the heart ache with hope deferred, or hope disappointed, or hope blighted and blasted beyond revival. If there was many a first volume into which it was enough to just diponce, twice, at the most thrice, and then away (like a shot!), there were others, and plenty, into which you found yourself over head and ears in no time; that is to say, irrespective of time, and also of space, as regards the artificial divisions of space into volumes one, two, and three. Of the former class I need say nothingnothing being the sum total of my knowledge and estimate of their contents. Of the latter-those which amused, or interested, or excited, or enthralled, or enlightened me- a few "trivial fond records" may be put on paper, and be thence, the editor wills it, "set up" (setup things, with a vengeance!) into print. To begin, then, with the author of "Mary Barton," to whom I hereby, with equal cordiality and respect, address the My landlord had next to nothing but thanks of a weary invalid (and in so tales, in his rolling stock, or circulating doing I but express the obligations of a library. Novels are the order of the day goodly company besides, of like condiand the voices of the night, in genteel tion in mind, body, or estate) for hours of watering-places; and a circulating libra- relief, and ministrations of healing power rian is one who, ex officio, living to please, and soothing effect. If Scott ascribed to must please to live, by ignoring all heavy Mrs. Radcliffe, much more may we to books, historical, archæological metaphy- Mrs. Gaskell, a benignant influence in those sical, and what not, and by securing early moments of pain and of languor, when copies of light ones. Hence my literary the whole head is sore, and the whole fare was not of a kind to tax the brain. heart is faint. "If those," says the masThe consignments that were for ever ar-ter of his craft, "who rail indiscriminately riving from below, were not of the class of solids or strong meats; rather they resembled in character and consistency, that frivolous confection trifle (if I may singu at his species of composition"-a species including, be it remembered, the "Mysteries of Udolpho" and "North and South," alike, but oh, how different !— "were to consider the quantity of actual pleasure which it produces, and the much greater proportion of real sorrow and distress which it alleviates, their philanthropy ought to moderate their critical pride, or religious intolerance." Even critical pride and religious intolerance, however, now-a-days, 'gin to pale their ineffectual fire before here and there a bright particular star; and austere elders, of either sex, who once would neither read, nor allow dependants to read, any thing printed in three volumes post octavo, in large type and with broad margins, at price thirty-one-and-sixpence for pure purchase, and ninepence or thereabouts on loan-now compose themselves to read, item mark, item learn, item inwardly digest, and, to crown all, outwardly approve, these formerly forbidden fruits. Dissenting ministers applaud them in nonconformist magazines, and white-haired rectors add them to the parochial library. Intolerance is, indeed, now and then heard to denounce such deeds, and "To swear-in faith, 'tis strange, 'tis passing strange, 'Tis pitiful, 'tis wondrous pitiful;" but she is commonly treated as one in her dotage, who, daily decaying and waxing old, is ready to vanish away: surviving, perhaps, in spirit, but removed as a palpable presence and overshadowing bodily form. off, double quick march, with his hood over his face, and a flea in his ear. The monk made a sensation in his day, it is true. Mary Barton has made a sensation in hers; not quite so great or peculiar, but of a less exceptionable, nay of a really enviable kind. Between the two there is the difference beteen disease and health, the unnatural and the natural, the excitement of man's lower passions and the good fight of faith, of human aspiration, "chastened, stemmed Here, if need be, struggling with storms, and At every season green, sweet at all hours." Long, she tells us, had the author of "Mary Barton" felt a deep sympathy with the careworn men, her Manchester fellowtownsmen, who elbowed her daily in its bustling streets, and looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want; "tossed to and fro by circumstances, apparently She had personally won the confidence of in even a greater degree than other men." one or two of the more thoughtful among them, who laid open their hearts to her, making bitter complaints of the neglect they experienced from the prosperous, the masters whose fortunes they had helped to build up, "the even tenor of whose seeming happy lives appeared to increase the anguish caused by the lottery-like nature of their own." Hence she became anxious to "give some utterance to the agony which from time to time convulses this dumb people"-be it the agony of suffering without the sympathy of the happy, or of erroneously believing that such is the to eat his words baked under a thick clam- case. We have the result in sundry livmy crust of humble-pie, after a curricu-ing and speaking portraits in "Mary Barlum of study, devoted to the writings of (say) Currer Bell, and Miss Mullock, and Mrs. Gaskell. He should be set to read "Mary Barton," and the "Moorland Cottage," for instance; to trace in every line a lady's white handiwork; that done, Mat, why, "henceforth "As a rule,” says Monk Lewis, "I have an aversion, a pity and contempt for all female scribblers. The needle, not the pen, is the instrument they should handle, and the only one they ever use dexterous ly." Now, "I would give many a sugar-cane Mat Lewis were alive again," ton" and in "North and South;" in the former, John Barton, the Chartist, the Communist, "all that is commonly called wild and visionary," but having with all his weakness a sort of practical power, and a ready kind of rough Lancashire eloquence, and a pretty clear head at times for method and arrangement-the whole making him useful to his order, especially as it is his class, his order that he stands by, "not the rights of his own paltry The mannikin's monk would have to make self,"-and George Wilson, no arguer, no The white hand of a lady fever thee, of the " speechifier, but a kind-hearted specimen | he'd leave go. . . . Thornton's as dour 'poor cotton-weyver, as mony a as a door-nail; an obstinate chap, every one knoowas, hoo's nowt for t' yeat, and inch on him-th' oud bull-dog!" This hoo's worn eawt his clooas:" in the latter, self-made man of the North at once imBoucher, the frenzied rioter and suicide, presses observers from the South with the and Nicholas Higgins, whose creed is, that idea of one who " seems made for his when you see the world going all wrong niche; sagacious, and strong, as becomes at this time of day, bothering itself with a great tradesman ;" he looks like a perthings it knows nothing about, and leav- son who would enjoy battling with every ing undone all the things that lie in dis- adverse thing he could meet with-eneorder close at its hand, you should leave mies, winds, or circumstances. He is "all this talk of religion" alone, and proud of his town and trade; he would set to work on what you see and know: rather be a man toiling, suffering-nay, a proud man withal is Nicholas Higgins, failing and successless-among mills and for even on his last legs he "wunnot sto- cotton-bales, than lead what he accounts mach the notion of having favor curried a dull prosperous life in the old worn for him, by one as doesn't know the ins grooves of more aristocratic society down and outs of the quarrel" between masters in the South, with their slow days of care and men, heads and "hands." "How less ease. "One may be clogged with proud that man is !" exclaims the good honey, and unable to rise and fly." As clergyman who had offered to mediate. for his "hands," he holds that despotism "He is," answers Margaret; "but what is the best kind of government for them; grand makings of a man there are in him, and he rules them as an autocrat who will pride and all!" neither be forced to give his reasons nor, Nor are the manufacturers overlooked flinch from what he has once declared to or underrated, in the author's zeal for the be his resolution. They pronounce him operatives. Probably on no portrait in" as iron a chap as any in Milton"-and her rapidly-extending gallery has she be- with growing anger and hardly smothered stowed more pains, or worked with more hatred come to look upon him as what quickening sympathy, than that of Mr. the Bible calls a "hard man,"—not so Thornton, in "North and South." If we much unjust as unfeeling; clear in judg incline to tire a little of him, it is only be- ment, says Margaret, and standing upon cause we have lately had such a flood of his "rights" as "no human being ought these hard-headed, strong-hearted lovers, to stand, considering what we and all our in the fictions of the day, all of whom are petty rights are in the sight of the Alat first so intolerable to the heroine, and mighty." But let this oxλnpos, this hard at length fascinate her as never was he- man, be seen by the bedside of suffering, roine fascinated before-ugly, rough-man- let note be taken of his pitying eyes, and nered, outspoken, strong-willed men, of his grave but tremulous voice-and anon uncouth or offensive manners, but rough the discord jars upon Margaret inexpressdiamonds of great price, the roughness ibly; for how reconcile those eyes, that wearing off in the second volume, and the voice, with the hard-reasoning, dry, merprecious stone shining more and more ciless way in which he lays down axioms unto perfect sunlight in the third. "What of trade, and serenely follows them out to sort of a master is Mr. Thornton ?" asks their full consequences? Or let him be Margaret of Higgins. "Did yo' ever see closeted with Margaret's father, who is a bull-dog?" Nicholas replies: "Set a bull-led on to unbosom himself of perilous stuff dog on hind legs, and dress him up in coat and breeches, and yo'n just getten John Thornton." Margaret objects to this zoological analogy, that though the gentleman is plain enough, he's not like a bull-dog, with its short, broad nose, and snarling upper lip. Nicholas proceeds, discriminating, but justifying his illustration: "No! not in the look, I grant yo'. But let John Thornton get hold on a notion, and he'll stick to it like a bull-dog; yo' might pull him away wi' a pitchfork ere that weighs upon the heart, of doubts, fears, wandering uncertainties that seek rest but find none, so tear-blinded their eyes; and this cotton-lord is all sympathy, this man of action understands the man of speculation, seems to have passed through the very stage of thought himself, and can suggest where the exact ray of light is to be found, which shall make the dark places plain. "Man of action, as he was, busy in the world's great battle, there was a deeper religion binding him to God in his heart, in spite of his strong will- | breast the tides of a life of action, much fulness, through all his mistakes, than Mr. less the waves of a sea of troubles; his Hale had ever dreamed. Here, in short, nervous, little-minded, faint-hearted wife; is a character of native wealth and latent their faithful old servant, Dixon, with her resources, upon which the author, with a airs and assumptions; Mrs. Thornton, novelist's privilege and high prerogative, rigid, forbidding, and coarsely tyrannical, may draw to any amount, confident that but sound at the core, and as liable to be her drafts will be honored, how many so- misread as to misread others; Mr. Bell, ever they be. affectionate and ease-loving, bon vivant but fast friend; all these, and others in "North and South," are done to the life. Nor may Bessie Higgins be forgotten, as an equally true sketch, though some who have never come across a like character may suppose it fanciful or unreal, which it assuredly is not. With power and spirit she orders the "strife and peace" between him and Margaret; there is the finesse of a practised hand in her way of gradually and artfully composing these antagonistic forces. Whether he or she bears the bell in interest and character may be, in mixed multitudes must be, a vexed question. Souls masculine, offspring of rude Boreas, the bracing North, will be for John Thornton; souls feminine, children of the sweet South, for Margaret Hale. Not that Margaret is a soft Southron maiden, whose tender face the winds of the North would visit too roughly; quite the reverse. She has not been enervated by the mild zephyrs of her original home; she is strengthened not shaken, invigorated not chilled, by the rousing breezes of a bleaker clime. She is one whose "keen enjoyment of every sensuous pleasure" is "balanced finely, if not overbalanced, by her conscious pride in being able to do without them all, if need were." And though the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it, and though Margaret's previsions of advent trial take no such shape as destiny decrees, yet is hers one of those natures, and preeminently so, which are meet to be perfected through suffering. She looks as grand and serene, says the good old Oxford Fellow, Adam Bell, "as one who has struggled, and may be struggling, and yet has the victory secure in sight." The anguish she suffers from the lie wrung from her, in fear for a brother's life, is vividly told. The scene that gives occasion to it, between her and the police inspector, is one of great effect; so again is that of the attack on Thornton's house by the rioters, though the climax is a little theatrical; and that of next morning's interview between her and the mill-owner; and that which secures her control of the stubborn, bereaved father, drunk and in dudgeon, strong in his self-will, but swayed by her stronger womanly will. The dreamy, conscientious clergyman-refined, gentle, courteous, and utterly unfitted to Mrs. Gaskell's command of pathos is well proven, and this sick girl exemplifies it anew. Indeed, examples to the same effect abound in "North and South," confirming the reputation which had already been acquired by many a scene and sentiment in "Mary Barton," by the subdued and touching quietude of occasional chapters in "Cranford," and the intensity of grief and corroding care in "Ruth." The last is indeed a painfully-wrought chronicle of "life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame:" 'tis an old tale, and often told; told almost often in vain, told almost never so movingly as here; "but, weleaway!" says old Chaucer, "But, weleaway! the harme, the routhe, That for to thynke hyt a tene is." The pathos of "Cranford" may be less demonstrative than in the other tales, but its natural and unstrained character merits particular mention. It is, to apply what has been said of a very different novelist, "expressif et touchant par les détails, pris dans la vie la plus simple, la condition la plus obscure." Humor, too, a natural correlative of this quality of genuine pathos, is vouchsafed to the author in a degree unknown to all her sister novelists of the day. Many of them attempt the humorous, but were they wise-had they, indeed, a true sense of humor-they would forbear. One might be named whose vis comica is exhibited only in spasmodic efforts to be funny; another, in an extra allowance of twaddle, italics, and inverted commas; a third, in cynicism and mordant satire; a fourth, in coarse and ill-conditioned jocularity. Mrs. Gaskell is healthily alive to |