HERR VON TEUFELSKOPF was a High German doctor, of the first class.  He had taken his diploma of Beelzebub in the Black Forest, and was gifted with as fine a hand to force a card—­with as glib a tongue to harangue a mob at wakes and fairs, as any professor since the birth of the fourth grace of life,—­swindling.  He would talk until his head smoked of his list of miraculous cures—­of his balsams, his anodynes, his elixirs; in the benevolence of his soul he would, to accommodate the pockets of the poor, sell a pennyworth of the philosopher’s stone; and, as a further illustration of his sympathy for suffering man or woman, give, even for a kreutzer, a mouthful of the Fountain of Youth.  As a water-doctor, too, his Sagacity was inconceivable.  A hundred years ago, he told to a fraction the amount of the national debt, from a single glance at the specimen sent him by JOHN BULL; and more, for five-and-twenty years predicted who would be the incoming Lord Mayor of London, from an inspection of a pint of water presented to him every season from Aldgate-pump.  He could prophesy all the politics of the Court of Aldermen from a phial filled at Fleet-ditch; and could at any time—­no trifling task—­tell the amount of corruption in the House of Commons, by taking up a handful of water at Westminster-bridge.  On his stolen visit to England—­for the honour he has done our country has never been generally known—­he calculated to a nicety how many puppies and kittens were annually drowned in the Thames, and how many suicides—­particularising the sex and dress of each sufferer—­were committed in the same period, from a bottlefull of Thames water brought to him wherewith to dilute his brandy at the Ship public house, Greenwich—­a hostelry much frequented by Doctor TEUFELSKOPF.  We have seen the calculation very beautifully illuminated on ass’s skin, and at this moment deposited in the college of Heligoland.  It is not generally known that the Doctor died in this country; lustily predicting, however, that after a nap of a score or so of years he would return to this life in an entirely new character.  The Doctor has kept his word.  HERR VON TEUFELSKOPF, as Sir THOMAS BROWNE says, is “lived over again” in Sir ROBERT PEEL!

It is impossible to reflect upon the enlarged humanity of Sir ROBERT—­for though, indeed, he is no other than the old German quack revived, we will not refuse to him his new name—­toward the sufferers of Paisley, without feeling that the fine spirit of finesse which made the reputation of the student of the Black Forest has in no way suffered from its long sleep; but, on the contrary, has risen very much refreshed for new practice.  The Doctor never compassed so fine a sleight as Sir ROBERT when lately, playing the philanthropist, he struck his breeches’ pocket with a spasm of benevolence, and pulled therefrom—­fifty pounds!  Only a few weeks before, Sir ROBERT had sworn by all his list of former cures, that he would clothe the naked and feed the hungry, if he were duly authorised