that in perpetual remembrance of the pain inflicted by his winged assailant, he decreed that the alphabet should ever after commence with A B. Others suppose the whole ode to be allegorical, expressing how much Cupid felt stung and nettled at being compelled to undergo the drudgery of learning those letters. The precedence of B to C has been explained upon the principle that a man must be before he can see; but these, I apprehend, are plausible and ingenious conjectures, unsupported by any great philological or lexicographical authorities. Many curious discoveries have already been made in the hidden properties of letters, and the number might be indefinitely increased by the stimulating patronage and ingenious researches of the Society. But for the ingenuity of recent investigators, we should never have known that the letter S was of essential service at the siege of Gibraltar, by making hot shot; that the letter N is like a little pig, because it makes a sty nasty; that the letters U V can never go out to dinner because they always come after T; that the letters oast are like toast without tea (T); and that a barber may be said to fetter the alphabet, because he ties up queues and puts toupees in irons. These most important additions to our philological science are a happy foretaste of what may be accomplished by a chartered company expressly instituted for the encouragement of letters.

My limits not allowing me to enter at length into the subject of our hawkers' and pedlars' literature, vulgarly denominated the London Cries, I shall content myself with hinting that much of it is so alarmingly

dissonant and cacophonous, as to need a thorough emendation. The wretches who yell-" Hi-aw-Marakrel!" and "Owld Clew!" should be compelled to articulate in a sweet and gracious voice-"Here are Mackarel" and "Old Clothes." Our murderous dustmen's bells have converted many invalids, by depriving them of rest, into fit materials for their cart; and as their cry is at least as discordant as their clapper, I would have all these noisy nuisances converted into euphonious melodists by an immediate decree of the Society. The postman, as a man of letters, will of course receive a licence to bear the bell wherever he goes; and the muffin-man's tinkle is too inoffensive to require regulation. The great majority of our cries demand revision; but I would have no innovation upon the milkwoman's--'mi-eau! (probably handed down to us from the Norman times,) which is not only valuable as an antiquity, but as a frank confession that one-half of the commodity she vends is

water.

From words, which are the signs of ideas, the Society may turn their attention to the signs of our publichouses, in which a very barbarous taste and a Gothic predilection for gorgons, and monsters, and chimæras dire, is still but too visible. Since the recent discoveries in the interior of Asia, we are warranted in retaining the unicorn for our national arms; but the good taste of the Society will induce them to visit our public-houses, and procure the suppression of all such preposterous symbols as the Phoenix, the Griffin, the Green-dragon, the Blue-boar, the Red, Silver, and

Golden Lions, with a hundred others; nor will they allow the continuance of such anomalous conjunctions as the Green Man and Still, which a recent French traveller has very excusably translated, "L'homme vert et tranquille."

A LAMENTATION UPON THE DECLINE OF BARBERS.

When they who lived to puff, by fortune cross'd,
Must puff to live; when they whose fame was spread
From pole to pole are in oblivion lost,

And having others pinch'd, are pinch'd for bread ;—
When by more sad reverse they're environ'd

Than any told of Emperor or Caliph,

And they, who once toupees and queues have iron'd,
Must mind their P's and Q's to 'scape the bailiff,—
Well may they cry-"The age that treats us thus,
When most un-barber'd is most barberous."

IN tracing the changes produced by the alteration of human habits in the different ages and nations of the world, nothing is more affecting than to contemplate the reverses to which whole classes of our fellowcreatures are exposed by sudden fluctuations of fashion; and in all the sad records of prostration from eminence and favour to obscurity and neglect, we doubt whether any can offer a more melancholy contrast than the past and present situation of our Bar

bers. With the embalmers of the dead, and forgers of armour for the living, whose "occupation's gone," we sympathise no more than we shall with the keepers of Lottery Offices, who will shortly be in the same predicament: their pursuits are associated with death, blood, and rapine; but the Barber's Profession (for by a statute of Henry the Eighth it is termed a science and a mystery) holds affinity with every thing that is gentle, touching, and endearing. Perhaps it would not be too much to affirm that the civilization of a state cannot be measured by any surer criterion than the estimation in which these professors are held; and, that we may not be deemed overweening in our veneration for their craft, we will endeavour to support our assertion by such historical evidence as more immediately occurs to our recollection.

Beginning with the Jews, as the most ancient people, and one to whom the Barber's soothing influence was utterly unknown, we may remark that their whole annals are a tissue of violence, horror, and abomination, which finally condemned them to become a rejected race,-a doom from which a portion of them have escaped, in modern days, by subjecting themselves to those great civilizers, the wielders of the razor; while the lower orders, who still wear the badge of reprobation upon their chins, continue in a state of comparative barbarism. And yet the dangers of this adherence to their hair were manifested to them at a very early age. When David sent embassadors to the king of the Ammonites, he cut off one half of their beards from the side of the face, as the greatest insult he

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could offer, and in this plight escorted them back to their master-an indignity which could not have been inflicted, had their chins been in a more advanced state of civilization. Joab, the chief captain of David, seeing Absalom hanging upon an oak-tree by the hair of the head, pierced him to death; and the same Joab, while he took Amasa by the beard to kiss it, treacherously plunged a poniard into his body,—two acts of barbarity which could not have been perpetrated had the victims been submitted to the benign practitioners of the scissors and the razor. The men most remarkable for their hair seem to have been always the most hardened in iniquity, and to have been generally singled out for some calamitous fate. To that of Absalom we have already adverted; Samson, whose strength was in his hair, after having been blinded, was crushed for his wickedness; and Esau, another hairy man, is expressly stated by St. Paul to have been a profane person, and one hated of God.

During the most barbarous period of their history, that is to say, up to the time of Alexander the Great, the Greeks wore their beards; but that prince ordered the Macedonians to be shaved, lest this appendage should afford a handle to their enemies-a most sufficing reason, for one can hardly conceive a less enviable situation than to find a vigorous adversary grasping your beard with his left hand, and flourishing a sword over your head with his right. The Conqueror himself, as might have been expected from so polished and magnanimous a character, kept a special barber in his house; and the same is recorded of Julius