housekeeper's room, inspiration gives a double knock at his heart. An
author in a pantry certainly writes under great disadvantages, for it
cannot be said that he is there writing for his _bread_. In such a
place, the loaf is in his eye--the larder is so near, he may almost dip
his pen into it by mistake--and positive beef gleams through the veil of
the safe, softened to his eye, yet still solider than beef of the
imagination. In truth, a man has much to overcome in preparing food for
the mind, in the very thick of food for the body;--for a good authority
(no less a man than Mr. Bayes) has strenuously advised that the belly
should be empty when the brain is to be unloaded. How can a gentleman's
gentleman, with a _corpus_ that banishes his backbone nearly four
feet from the table at which he sits, betake himself to his cogitations
over a tankard of October, and expect to beat your true thin
garret-haunting devil, with an inside like a pea-shooter, who can
scarcely be said to be one remove from the ethereal, and who writes from
that best of inspirations--an empty pantry? We shall presently see
whether an author from below is better than one from above--whether it
will be more eligible that the Muses should have several more stories
to descend, when their nine ladyships are invoked so to do--and that the
pen should be taken out of the scraggy hand of a gentleman in rags, and
be placed in the plump gripe of a gentleman in tags.

Before we proceed to give an account of the book before us, we must yet
take leave to indulge in a few reflections on the effect of this mental
explosion in the noddles of John and James and Richard, upon reviewers,
publishers, and the world in general. This change of lodging in the
author will turn many things topsy-turvy, and conjure the spirit out of
much long-established facetiousness. Pictures of poets in garrets will
soon not be understood; bathos will be at a premium! the bard will be
known, not by the brownness of his beaver, but by the gold band that