itself? it may be so from the vivifying aid it lends to the springs of
imaginative writing. We have therefore no right to complain of the
_leaven_ of Mr. Tait's Magazine: it is anything but dull: _e.g._ the life
and jauntiness of the following paper is very pleasant, shrewd, and clever:

_The Martinet_.

The "Martinet" is the name of a genus, not of a species; the title of a
race variously feathered, but having specific qualities in common. There
is your military martinet, your clerical martinet, your legal martinet,
and the martinet of common life, ("_Gallicrista fastidiosa communis_,"
Linnaeus would class him,) who is to the others what the house-sparrow is
to the rest of his tribe. It is with him alone we have to do. The
"martinet" is a person who is all his life violently busied in
endeavouring to be a perfect gentleman, and who _almost_ succeeds. He
misses the point by over-stepping it. He is like one of those greyhounds
which outrun the hare fleetly enough, but cannot "_take_" her when they
have done so. They have a little too much speed, and a little too little
tact. The martinet is always bent upon thinking, saying, doing, and having,
every thing after a nicer fashion than other people, until his nicety runs
into downright mannerism; all his ideas become "clipped taffeta," and all
his eggs are known to have "two yolks." He rarely comes of age or is
thoroughly ripe till near forty, before which he may be a little of the
precise fop, and after which he changes to the somewhat foppish precisian,
which is the best definition of him. He would be an excellent member of
society were he not a little too nice for its every-day work, which, to
speak a truth in metaphor, will not always admit of white gloves. He is
remarkably consistent in all his proceedings, however, and the outward man
is a perfect and complete type of the inward, and _vice versa_. His soul
is never out of pumps and silk stockings, and picks its way amidst the