his
tomfooleries. He has thrown away the better part of himself--his great
inclination for the LOW, namely; if he would but leave off scents for
his handkerchief, and oil for his hair; if he would but confine himself
to three clean shirts a week, a couple of coats in a year, a beefsteak
and onions for dinner, his beaker a pewter-pot, his carpet a sanded
floor, how much might be made of him even yet! An occasional pot of
porter too much--a black eye, in a tap-room fight with a carman--a night
in the watch-house--or a surfeit produced by Welsh-rabbit and gin and
beer, might, perhaps, redden his fair face and swell his slim waist; but
the _mental_ improvement which he would acquire under such treatment--
the intellectual pluck and vigour which he would attain by the stout
diet--the manly sports and conversation in which he would join at the
Coal-Hole, or the Widow's, are far better for him than the feeble
fribble of the Reform Club (not inaptly called "The Hole in the Wall");
the windy French dinners, which, as we take it, are his usual fare; and,
above all, the unwholesome Radical garbage which form the political food
of himself and his clique in the House of Commons.

For here is the evil of his present artificial courses--the humbug
required to keep up his position as dandy, politician, and philosopher
(in neither of which latter characters the man is in earnest), must get
into _his heart_ at last; and then his trade is ruined. A little more
politics and Plato, and the natural disappears altogether from Mr.
Bulwer's writings: the individual man becomes as undistinguishable
amidst the farrago of philosophy in which he has chosen to envelope
himself, as a cutlet in the sauces of a French cook. The idiosyncracy of
the mutton perishes under the effects of the adjuncts: even so the
moralising, which may be compared to the mushrooms, of Mr. Bulwer's
style; the poetising, which may be likened unto the flatulent turnips
and carrots; and the politics, which are as the gravy, reeking of filthy
garlic, greasy with rancid oil;--even so, we say, pursuing this savoury
simile to its fullest extent, the natural qualities of young Pelham--the
wholesome and juicy _mutton of the mind_, is shrunk and stewed away.

Or, to continue in this charming vein of parable, the author of _Pelham_
may be likened to Beau Tibbs. Tibbs, as we all remember, would pass for
a pink of fashion, and had a wife whom he presented to the world as a
paragon of vi