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rations of his calling, attained proficiency in the tobacconist's mystery, and in the fulness of time trod with a master's step on the floor which he had originally swept. It is of little consequence what a man's trade may be in London; provided he only sticks to it, he is sure to get on. Burstall stuck to his, and, so far as profit went, had no reason to complain; but, like all the rest of the world, he had a bitter drop in his cup. Keeping out of the noose altogether, he made no unhappy marriage, had no spendthrift son to vex his soul, embarked in no ruinous speculation, was betrayed by no friend-that is to say, not to any extent worth speaking of and was happy in all his social relations. What, then, was his grievance? It is told in one short sentence. He grew fat! So fat, indeed, as to become a wonder of obesity, a torment to himself, and a standing joke to all who came near him. In vain he lived frugally-in vain he took all sorts of exercise; whatever he did to prevent it the adipose tendency continually increased. He went to scale every day, and every day the balance-like that in his ledger-was on his side. A gamester would have paid high for his secret: his substance he could not lose.

To get rid of superfluous fat, Brillat-Savarin, who had connaissance de cause, recommends, in the first instance, three things: discretion in eating, moderation in sleep, and exercise on horseback. But while giving this general advice he feels, he says, that it is entirely thrown away"parceque je connais les hommes et les choses, et que toute prescription qui n'est pas exécutée à la lettre ne peut pas produire d'effet."

Burstall-for reasons of his own-had never read the " Physiologie du Goût," but he had listened to a great deal of advice, and-what would have astonished the French epicurean philosopher-had followed it. Not, it is true, in early life-when he was almost the prototype of that fat boy who so much excited Mr. Pickwick's wonderment-for then we listen to nothing but our own inclinations; but when that debatable time of life arrived which is denominated "years of discretion." You may be wise at twenty, I far from being so at forty, when a man is said to be "either a fool or his own physician," though the faculty would say he who at that age attempts to pluck out the heart of their mystery is unquestionably a fool, however little he may be of a physician. But with Burstall the period stole on him somewhere between the extremes just mentioned, and went hand-in-hand with a growing apprehension of obesity.

When Edgar, disguised as a peasant, is threatened by Goneril's steward, he replies: "An ch'ud ha' been zwagger'd out of my life, 'twould not ha' been zo long as 'tis by a vortnight;" so Burstall, if being laughed at could have made him thin, would long before forty have rivalled the living skeleton. As it was, he grew fatter and fatter, more and more uncomfortable, and his readiness to seek a remedy for the growing evil increased with his discomfort. His business being very lucrative, he could not tear himself from it to undertake a walking tour through the land of his guardian angel-the wooden Highlander-but he conceded to violent exercise all that was in his power. His private residence-after he began to make money and fat-was at Hammersmith, and to reach the shop he resolved to row there, starting at sunrise and mooring his skiff some three hours afterwards to Queenhithe Wharf, the nearest point to Garlick-hill. In using the word "skiff," a kind of poetical license has been indulged

in, for the oar he tugged at belonged to no trim-built wherry, but to that sort of boat called the heavy and safe, especially adapted to the exigencies of gentlemen who are at once corpulent and timid. Burstall larded the lean thwart he sat on, but the more he perspired, the more muscular he became, and with his muscularity sprung up a prodigious appetite. To use his own words, he made a new quartern loaf and a pound of fresh butter look foolish when he landed in the City, completely took the shine out of a boiled leg of mutton and trimmings when, after a repetition of the morning dose of aquatics, he sat down to his suburban dinner. Neither can a man row without drinking—at least Burstall couldn't-indeed he was told it was not good for him by his companion, the waterman of whom he hired the boat and consequently a pot of stout at each end of the voyage was imbibed to quench his-no, not exactly his-their, mutual thirst, so that, what between eating and drinking, Burstall, instead of wasting away, got fatter.

The boat, therefore, was given up, and Burstall tried another mode of training. Attired in the costume of a prize-fighter-that is to say, wearing drab shorts, high-lows, white cotton stockings, a white hat, and a round jacket, not of the strictly orthodox flannel, but, for more variety, of grasshopper-green corduroy, with mother-of-pearl buttons, Burstall's figure presented many salient points which it was evidently in his interest to keep down. As, however, no one else had any interest in the question, he trained after his own fashion, observing no particular rule as to diet, or putting himself under any restraint as to quantity, and the result, in this case as in the former one, was manifest increase in size.

Walking exercise, like rowing, was consequently abandoned, after a long experience had satisfied him that walking was, in his case, no go; and, acting on the recommendation of a friend, he got into the saddle. He had some difficulty, to be sure, in getting there, for his was not the form, like that of our Prince Harry, to "rise from the ground like feathered Mercury;" but, with the aid of a Windsor chair and a few vigorous shoves a tergo, he managed at last to identify himself with the pigskin. Not for long, however, for amongst other defects in his education was the notable one of not having learnt to ride, and, as a matter of course, the moment his horse went out of a walk he tumbled off like an apple. There was exercise in tumbling, no doubt, but as it was attended with the risk of a broken neck, Burstall, in a very bruised condition, forswore horsemanship, as he had been compelled to forswear his previous locomotive and sedentary experiments.

Having tried pleasant remedies till he was tired, Burstall next had recourse to unpleasant ones. It was a feature of his character that whatever he undertook for the purpose of reducing his bulk, he went at cheerfully. It was a hard thing to be obliged to forego the aliments in which he most delighted, but, placing reliance on nothing else, he had resolution enough to put his faith in physic. He swallowed, as he said, "gallons upon gallons" of nameless drenches, but their only effect was to make him flabby. Seeing this, he tried tonics, and then became tight as a drum, but still the fat remained; no-not remained-continued to augment, till what with his tightness and his rotundity, he could not stoop to tie his shoe, was obliged to come down stairs backwards for fear of being precipitated headforemost, and when, puffing and blowing like a grampus,

he tried to ascend, it was only by the aid of the banisters that he could make the slightest progress.

It was shown, in an early chapter of this narrative, how Loftus Tippy, being only hypochondriacal-the worst ailment, after all, with which a mortal can be visited-essayed the Turkish baths in Jermyn-street. To that sudorific establishment did Burstall also resort, where, with the exception of spines, he looked, when in a state of nature, very like the seaurchin which we sometimes see suspended in fishmongers' shops. At first these baths seemed likely to accomplish his darling object, and great indeed was his satisfaction at seeing the fat melt, as it were, from off his person, beneath the strenuous grip of the dusky manipulator who gravely worked away at him. But the expectation of getting thinner by the process of shampooing proved a mere delusion. Burstall's elasticity was like that of an Indian-rubber ball, but the most elastic ball never diminishes in volume, though by dint of being battered about its powers of resistance are gradually weaker. So it befel with Burstall. He took fifty baths before he discovered that he was not quite so strong as when he began the sweating system, but when he had doubled that quantity, manifest signs of weakness warned him to forbear, especially on finding that the perseverance of nearly nine months had only been rewarded by the trifling loss of some five or six pounds of flesh-as unimportant an item in the gross amount of his corpulence as the halfpennyworth of bread at Falstaff's supper compared with the intolerable deal of sack.

Like all the rest of his appliances, the Turkish baths became worthless in the estimation of Burstall, who began to despair of being ever brought within the ordinary compass of humanity. His height we happen to know, but his weight and width remain to be told. At sixty-five years old, the period when Grimshaw unfeelingly threw into his teeth the reproach of resembling a sow with pig, Burstall weighed two hundred and forty pounds avoirdupoise-a word purposely invented, one would think, for such as he; and measured round the middle-it would be the extreme of absurdity to say waist-something very like sixty-eight inches, or rather more than he was long.

Before he quite arrived at these dimensions, Burstall had abandoned his riverair abode at Hammersmith and taken refuge in the more ele vated region of St. John's Wood, in the hope that the purest air round London would help to dissipate ailments which unfortunately began to be the companions of his obesity. But there was one thing on which Burstall had not calculated. He was naturally of a very genial nature, and there were, as we know, kindred spirits in the sylvan suburb; so that it was not long before he enrolled himself among the "United Lobsters," and, as a corollary to that enrolment, indulged in postprandial refections which tended to no abatement of the pinguitude by which he was oppressed. Yet still he never so greatly exceeded as to make his suppers an evident cause of bodily increase: his difficulty now was-as it always had been-to know what to leave off. He never suspected that the simple food of daily use contained all the elements of that fat which-without a form-had proved so fatal to his peace of mind. Roast pork was a dish in which he had revelled-roast pork and crackling, with its stimulating accompaniment of sage and onions;-roast goose, similarly stuffed and dulcified by apple-sauce, belonged to the same

category of enjoyment; well-browned and well-kidneyed loin of veal had been the solace of many a hungry hour; salmon, that salt-water miracle, had been so to speak-the target of his constant appetite; yet pork, goose, veal, and salmon, were successively obliterated from Burstall's bill of fare, not, indeed, without a sigh, but with a self-denying temperance that would have done honour to Xenocrates himself. He might as well have continued to feed on every savoury meat that his soul loved, for all the good that abstinence from them wrought upon his physique. Burstall had a notion that the secret lay in some kind of abstinence, but what that secret was he had not yet discovered. As Cowper's chaplain says: "The truth lies somewhere, if we knew but where."

It often happens, when we believe we are at the worst, when our affliction seems utterly irremediable, that relief approaches us from the most unexpected quarter. Smarting from the sting of Grimshaw's venomous remark, Burstall, on the day after it was made, complained to Spike of the degrading simile which the irate Stockbroker had applied to him.

"Oh," said Spike, carelessly, as if the thing were of no consequence, "you want to bring down that corporation of yours, do you? If you like to put yourself in my hands, I'll undertake to make you as genteel as you please before three months are over your head."

"If you could do that," said Burstall, eagerly, "I'd give you-I don't know what I wouldn't give you! But no," he added, in a sorrowful tone, "you can't-it's impossible!"

"Nothing's impossible," replied Spike, resolutely, "if you set to work the right way. Look here, Burstall, I'm not mercenary, I don't want money" (and, to say the truth of Spike, he really did not care for filthy lucre), " but, if you'll do me a certain favour, I promise to make you as slender as a girl-as thin as a whipping-post-within the time I named. I have a special remedy against getting too fat."

"Only name it-the favour, I mean," said Burstall, "and the thing is done."

"I think," replied Spike, "you are intimately acquainted with-I know I've heard you speak of him as if you were a gentleman named Hardback, who lives a little way out of town here at Hendon.”

"Know Abraham Hardback! I should think I did!" cried Burstall. "Why, we've been friends all our lives. He and I and Indigo, that lives close by him, and one or two more still living, were all at school together. What about Hardback?"

"I particularly wish to be introduced to him," said Spike.

"Is that all ?" rejoined Burstall. "I'll drive you over in my gig the first fine day."

"Agreed!" said Spike. "And now, slip over to my house, and let me have a little talk with you. I'll pull down your fat."

THE AMERICAN WAR.

THE war between the great sovereign people of the (still dis-) United States and the sovereign Rebs, as it is at present the fashion among the Loyalists to call the Secessionists, has now lasted three weary years, and hence it is that on this side of the Atlantic-where the restricted intellect of monarchical nations, as the great Americans assure us, is unable to understand Transatlantic politics, or grasp the mysteries of a wise democracy-people have grown heartily tired of the civil war. Assuredly the European public are very ungrateful in this matter, for the Americans fight annually for our gratification any quantity of battles, some of which might claim the rank of battles of the nations, if we were to examine the sextons' and the hospital lists. We see from this that ordinary bloodshed, even when carried on upon the grandest scale, is not in itself interesting. Even at the present day a well-described campaign of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is more exciting and instructive than the brannew bulletins which are transferred from the Transatlantic steamers to the English telegraph lines. It is no fault of ours that the American efforts affect us so little, for the charm of military history consists in evidence of strategic ability; but as the Americans are masters in the art of killing, but shockingly bad strategists, the history of these campaigns is entirely devoid of dramatic interest. When we read in any historical work, or in the report of a contemporary, an account of the battle of Waterloo, for instance, how excited we grow even at the distance of nearly fifty years, and though we know the conclusion long beforehand! Will Blücher, we ask ourselves, be able to hold his own? How long will it be ere we hear the Prussian artillery opening fire on the British left? We go through again and again moments which we really have not passed through, moments of the highest importance, because we at once survey the whole chain of results depending on success or non-success, and because on every minute's perseverance on our side depend the result of the year 1815 and the fate of a hemisphere.

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In our wars the fate of a universal dominion can be decided by the loss of a height or the holding of a burning village, but nothing of the sort can be discovered in the American civil war. Battles are gained and lost, prisoners made by tens of thousands, arms taken in numbers sufficient to equip a corps d'armée, flags captured or collected in the battle-field sufficient to fill churches or the halls of Congress, and, finally, the results are no greater than in a theatrical combat in a tragedy of Shakspeare. And yet we must confess that this war has trained a first-rate soldier. In the sight of the Southerners, there was never a god of war to equal Stonewall Jackson-a stone wall to protect the "Biblical" institution of slavery. Never, so Lee is stated to assure everybody, was there a better general and less selfish comrade than Longstreet. His men relate with pride and pleasure how he was never yet seen armed either on parade or in battle. He mounts his horse in a grey civilian coat, and wears a chimney-pot hat, the only weapon which General Longstreet employs in battle. Lieutenant-Colonel Fremantle, who made

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