en this time abroad, I have made a discovery for which
all prose writers ought to feel much indebted to me. Poets can invoke
Apollo, the Muses, the seasons, and all sorts and varieties of gods and
goddesses, naked or clothed, besides virtues and vices, and if none of
them suit, they may make their own graven image, and fall down before
it; but we prose writers have hitherto had no such advantage, no
protecting deity to appeal to in our trouble, as we bite our pens, or to
call upon to deliver us from a congestion of the brain. Now being aware
that there were upwards of three hundred and fifty thousand canonised
saints on the Roman calendar, I resolved to run through the catalogue,
to ascertain--if there was one who took prose authors under his
protection, and to my delight, I stumbled upon our man. By-the-bye, Tom
Moore must have known this, and he has behaved very ill in keeping him
all to himself. But I must introduce him. It is the most holy, and the
most blessed, Saint Brandon. Holy Saint Brandon inspire me, and guide
my pen while I record thy legend! In the first place, let me observe
that our patron saint was an Irishman, and none the worse for that, as
Ireland has had as good saints as any in the calendar. And it is now
clear that he does protect us prosaic writers, by the number of
reporters and gentlemen of the press which have been sent over from the
sister kingdom. But to proceed.

Saint Brandon, it appears, was a reading man, and amused himself with
voyages and travels; but Saint Brandon was an unbeliever, and thought
that travellers told strange things. He took up the Zoology of Pliny,
and pursued his accounts of "Antres vast, and men whose heads do grow
beneath their shoulders." He read until his patience was exhausted,
and, in a fit of anger, he threw the manuscript into the flames. Now
this was a heavy sin, for a man's book is the bantling of his brain,
and, to say the least, it was a literary-infanticide. That very night
an angel appeared to him, and as a penance for his foul crime (in the
enormity of which every author will agree with the angel), he was
enjoined to _make the book over again_, no easy task in those days, when
manuscripts were rare, and the art of book-making had not been invented.
The sinner, in obedience to the heavenly mission, goes to work; he
charters a vessel, lays in provisions for a seven years' voyage, and
with a crew of seven monks, he makes sail, and after going rou