advances by croaking out, "You're a fool--you're a fool, I tell you!"
until, upon my word, I began to think the creature was in the right. At
last my friend arrived, a little overheated. He had been taking a turn
at golf, to prepare him for "colloquy sublime." And wherefore not? since
the game, with its variety of odds, lengths, bunkers, tee'd balls, and
so on, may be no inadequate representation of the hazards attending
literary pursuits. In particular, those formidable buffets, which make
one ball spin through the air like a rifle-shot, and strike another down
into the very earth it is placed upon, by the mal-adroitness, or the
malicious purpose of the player--what are they but parallels to the
favourable or depreciating notices of the reviewers, who play at golf
with the publications of the season, even as Altisidora, in her approach
to the gates of the infernal regions, saw the devils playing at racket
with the new books of Cervantes' days.

Well, every hour has its end. Five o'clock came, and my friend, with his
daughters, and his handsome young son, who, though fairly buckled to the
desk, is every now and then looking over his shoulder at a smart
uniform, set seriously about satisfying the corporeal wants of nature;
I, stimulated by a nobler appetite after fame, wished that the touch of
a magic wand could, without all the ceremony of picking and choosing,
carving and slicing, masticating and swallowing, have transported a
_quantum sufficit_ of the good things on my friend's hospitable board,
into the stomachs of those who surrounded it, to be there at leisure
converted into chyle, while their thoughts were turned on higher
matters. At length all was over. But the young ladies sat still, and
talked of the music of the Freischutz, for nothing else was then thought
of; so we discussed the wild hunter's song, and the tame hunter's song,
&c. &c., in all which my young friends were quite at home. Luckily for
me, all this horning and hooping drew on some allusion to the Seventh