of Colburn or Bentley, seduce you from the comforts of
your hearth and home: let no enthusiastic accounts of military
greatness, no peninsular pleasures, no charms of campaigning life,
induce you to change your garb of country gentleman for the livery of
the Horse-Guards,--"making the green one red."

Be not mystified by Maxwell, nor lured by Lorrequer; let no panegyrics
of pipe-clay and the brevet seduce you from the peaceful path in life;
let not Marryat mar your happiness by the glories of those who dwell
in the deep waters; let not Wilson persuade you that the "Lights and
Shadows of Scottish Life" have any reference to that romantic people,
who betake themselves to their native mountains with a little oatmeal
for food and a little sulphur for friction; do not believe one
syllable about the girls of the west; trust not in the representations
of their blue eyes, nor of their trim ankles peering beneath a jupe of
scarlet--we can vouch it is true, for the red petticoat, but the rest
is apocryphal. Fly, we warn you, from Summers in Germany, Evenings in
Brittany, Weeks on the Rhine; away with tours, guide-books, and all
the John Murrayisms of travels. A plague upon Egypt! travellers have a
proverbial liberty of conscience, and the farther they go, the more
does it seem to stretch; not that near home matters are much better,
for our "Wild Sports" in Achill are as romantic as those in Africa,
and the Complete Angler is a complete humbug.

There is no faith--no principle in any of these men. The grave writer,
the stern moralist, the uncompromising advocate of the inflexible rule
of right, is a dandy with essenced locks, loose trousers, and looser
morals, who breakfasts at four in the afternoon, and spends his
evenings among the side scenes of the opera; the merry writer of whims
and oddities, who shakes his puns about like pepper from a
pepper-castor, is a misanthropic, melancholy gentleman, of mournful
look and unhappy aspect: the advocate of field-sports, of all the
joyous excitement of the hunting-field, and the bold dangers of the
chase, is an asthmatic sexagenarian, with care in his heart and gout
in his ankles; and lastly, he who lives but in the horrors of a
charnel-house, whose gloomy mind finds no pleasure save in the dark
and dismal pictures of crime and suffering, of lingering agony, or
cruel death, is a fat, round, portly, comely gentleman, with a laugh
like Falstaff, and a face whose every lineament and feature