The man who, in his progress through life, has listened with attention to the conversation of human beings, who has carefully read the writings of the best English authors, who has made himself well acquainted with the history and usages of his native land, and who has meditated much on all he has seen and read, must have been led to the firm conviction that by VEAL those who speak the English language intend to denote the flesh of calves, and that by a calf is intended an immature ox or cow.  A calf is a creature in a temporary and progressive stage of its being.  It will not always be a calf; if it live long enough, it will assuredly cease to be a calf.  And if impatient man, arresting the creature at that stage, should consign it to the hands of him whose business it is to convert the sentient animal into the impassive and unconscious meat, the nutriment which the creature will afford will be nothing more than immature beef.  There may be many qualities of Veal; the calf which yields it may die at very different stages in its physical and moral development; but provided only it die as a calf,—­provided only that its meat can fitly be styled Veal,—­this will be characteristic of it, that the meat shall be immature meat.  It may be very good, very nutritious and palatable; some people may like it better than Beef, and may feed upon it with the liveliest satisfaction; but when it is fairly and deliberately put to us, it must be admitted, even by such as like Veal the best, that Veal is but an immature production of Nature.  I take Veal, therefore, as the emblem of IMMATURITY,—­of that which is now in a stage out of which it must grow,—­of that which, as time goes on, will grow older, will probably grow better, will certainly grow very different. That is what I mean by Veal.

And now, my reader and friend, you will discern the subject about which I trust we are to have some pleasant and not unprofitable thought together.  You will readily believe that my subject is not that material Veal which may be beheld and purchased in the butchers’ shops.  I am not now to treat of its varied qualities, of the sustenance which it yields, of the price at which it may be procured, or of the laws according to which that price rises and falls.  I am not going to take you to the green fields in which the creature which yielded the Veal was fed, or to discourse of the blossoming hawthorn hedges from whose midst it was reft away.  Neither shall I speak of the rustic life, the toils, cares, and fancies of the farm-house near which it spent its brief lifetime.  The Veal of which I intend to speak is Moral Veal, or (to speak with entire accuracy) Veal Intellectual, Moral, and Aesthetical.  By Veal I understand the immature productions of the human mind,—­immature compositions, immature opinions, feelings, and tastes.  I wish to think of the work, the views, the fancies, the emotions, which are yielded by the human soul in its immature stages,—­while the calf (so