surround the city of Bladud.

"There are certain moments," said Tomlinson, looking pensively down at
his kerseymere gaiters, "when we are like the fox in the nursery rhyme,
'The fox had a wound, he could not tell where,'--we feel extremely
unhappy, and we cannot tell why. A dark and sad melancholy grows over
us; we shun the face of man; we wrap ourselves in our thoughts like
silkworms; we mutter fag-ends of dismal songs; tears come into our eyes;
we recall all the misfortunes that have ever happened to us; we stoop in
our gait, and bury our hands in our breeches-pockets; we say, 'What is
life?--a stone to be shied into a horsepond!' We pine for some
congenial heart, and have an itching desire to talk prodigiously about
ourselves; all other subjects seem weary, stale, and unprofitable. We
feel as if a fly could knock us down, and are in a humour to fall in
love, and make a very sad piece of business of it. Yet with all this
weakness we have at these moments a finer opinion of ourselves than we
ever had before. We call our megrims the melancholy of a sublime soul,
the yearnings of an indigestion we denominate yearnings after
immortality, nay, sometimes 'a proof of the nature of the soul!' May I
find some biographer who understands such sensations well, and may he
style those melting emotions the offspring of the poetical character,'
which, in reality, are the offspring of--a mutton-chop!"

[Vide Moore's "Life of Byron," in which it is satisfactorily shown
that if a man fast forty-eight hours, then eat three lobsters, and
drink Heaven knows how many bottles of claret; if, when he wake the
next morning, he sees himself abused as a demon by half the
periodicals of the country,--if, in a word, he be broken in his
health, irregular in his habits, unfortunate in his affairs, unhappy
in his home, and if then he should be so extremely eccentric as to